A Land of Ghosts - by David G Campbell (Paperback)

About the Book

With great narrative, Campbell takes readers with him as he travels 1,200 miles up the Amazon, turns left up the Rio Jurua, and continues for another 28 days to the town of Cruzeiro do Sul where he collects three friends and continues further into the rainforest.

Book Synopsis

For thirty years David G. Campbell has explored the Amazon, an enchanting terrain of forest and river that is home to the greatest diversity of plants and animals to have ever existed, anywhere at any time, during the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.

With great artistic flair, Campbell describes a journey up the Rio Moa, a remote tributary of the Amazon River, 2,800 miles from its mouth. Here he joins three old friends: Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; Tarzan, a street urchin brought up in a bordello; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together deep into the rainforest and set up camp in order to survey every woody plant on a two-hectare plot of land with about as many tree species as in all of North America.

Campbell introduces us to two remarkable women, Dona Cabocla, a widow who raised six children on that lonely frontier, and Dona Ausira, a Nokini Native American who is the last speaker of her tribe's ages-old language. These pioneers live in a land whose original inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking their traditions and languages with them. He explores the intimate relationship between the extinction of native language and the extirpation of biological diversity. "It's hard for a people to love a place that is not defined in words and thus cannot be understood. And it's easy to give away something for which there are no words, something you never knew existed."

In elegant prose that enchants and entrances, Campbell has written an elegy for the Amazon forest and its peoples-for what has become a land of ghosts.

Review Quotes

"[The Brazilian rain forest] is . . . marvelously described and movingly evoked . . . Campbell offers what feels like a lover's last, lingering look." --William Grimes

About the Author

DAVID G. CAMPBELL is a teacher, ecologist, and explorer who has worked on all seven continents. The author of the highly acclaimed The Crystal Desert: Summers in Antarctica, he is a recipient of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Award, the Burroughs Medal, and the Lannan Award for Nonfiction. Dr. Campbell is a professor of biology and the Henry R. Luce Professor in Nations and the Global Environment at Grinnell College.