A cross between Indiana Jones and Timothy Leary, Harvard botanist Schultes explored the farthest reaches of Amazonia in the middle decades of the 20th century and discovered hundreds of new plant species, including a number of hallucinogenic plants that helped spark the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. He took peyote with Kiowa medicine men for his undergrad thesis, and after that he was never too sick, crippled or pressed for time to detour miles through the rainforest to ingest an unfamiliar hallucinogen in a shamanic ritual. He even fixed up William Burroughs with some ayahuasca "vision vine," thanks to which the beat demigod "achieved pure bisexuality, becoming a man or a woman at will, awash with wild convulsions of lust." Schultes was also a talented amateur photographer, and this engaging biographical essay, adapted by ethnobotanist Davis (The Serpent and the Rainbow) from his full-length biography, is paired with gorgeous reproductions of Schultes’s black-and-white photographs from his travels among the Amazonian Indians. The photos include well-observed anthropological documents of Indian rituals and crafts, candid shots of everyday life and romantic photos of towering mesas, thundering falls and mist-shrouded rivers. The result is an absorbing biographical and visual record of a quickly vanishing culture and landscape and a larger-than-life explorer of exterior and interior terrains.

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*Starred Review* Schultes (1915-2001), of Harvard University, was a plant explorer and expert in sacred hallucinogenic plants. He was also, according to one of his proteges, ethnobotanist Davis, "a lover of all things Indian and Amazonian." Davis presented an in-depth portrait of his mentor in One River (1996) and now reveals another facet of this remarkable pioneer, Schultes' gifts as a field photographer. Schultes took hundreds of photographs of the northwest Amazon between 1941 and 1953, using a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera, which, as Davis so astutely observes, required the photographer to hold the camera at waist height and gaze down into it, thus bowing to one's subject. This posture of respect is in keeping with Schultes' sense of reverence and wonder, a quality palpable in his striking black-and-white photographs of Amazonians and their magnificent and mysterious world. An exhibition based on the book is touring the country, and with a foreword by another of Schultes' students, Andrew Weil, and Davis' illuminating commentary, The Lost Amazon stands as a keystone volume in the history of the Amazon. Donna Seaman

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