Landscape & Environment, Nature, Philosophy of

Shadows in the Sun

Name: Shadows in the Sun
Author: Wade Davis
ISBN: 9780767904025

by Wade Davis

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Overview

Set in locales ranging from the British Columbian wilderness to the jungles of the Amazon to the polar ice of the Arctic Circle, Shadows in the Sun is a testament to a world where spirits still stalk the land and seize the human heart. Though distilled from travels in widely separated parts of the world, Shadows in the Sun is fundamentally about landscape and character, the wisdom of lives drawn directly from the land, the hunger of those who seek to rediscover such understanding, and the consequences of failure.

About the Author, Wade Davis

Wade Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology, and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, from Harvard University. He spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, and later went to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies. The Haiti assignment led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow (Simon and Schuster, 1986), an international bestseller that was later released as a feature motion picture. He has published more than 90 scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian vodoun and Amazonian myth and religion to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians. Among his other books are Nomads of the Dawn (Pomegranate Press, 1995), Passage of Darkness (University of North Carolina Press, 1988) and One River (Simon and Schuster, 1996).

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

The wonders of the diversity of various cultures and their relationship to their landscapeþfrom the high Arctic and the northern forests to the swamps of the Orinocoþare hunted, gathered, and honestly appreciated here by the peripatetic Davis (One River, 1996). Davis is a sojourner in remote places. He tarries, hoping to get a taste of the intimate, deep reverence for the home place that indigenous people experience by staying put, to sample some of the mythopoetic associations and enigmatic happenings that spring like gifts from the land for those who sit still long enough to witness. Here he recounts a dozen journeys, some in search of ethnobotanicals, some to expose himself to the poetics of a particular patch of ground, others to get a psychic education, as when he accompanies the Haitian Vodouns in their pilgrimage to sacred places, both terrestrial and ethereal. There is a good profile of Bruno Manser, a Swiss who went to live among Sarawak's Penan and joined them in their fight against the pillagers (many of them governmental) of their forest, thus becoming "a fugitive straddling the cusp of cultures." That same place, the shear zone, is inhabited by hamans, and Davis has been disturbed and fascinated in many of his travels by these men and women operating outside our familiar calculus of explanation. And as an ethnobotanist, he is drawn to the human potential unleashed by profoundly altered statesþfirewalking, slowing heartbeats to near imperceptible levelsþand the psychotropics that serve as launch pads. One such hallucinogen comes from a monstrous toad that secretes a drug from glands on its head; it seems very handy for a quick slurp, but it turns outthat you have to toke the toad to get the best buzz. Davis's lovely, cubist, rich landscape portraits are also topographies of the spirit, conveying a sense of place, but perhaps even more, the music of place.