Category — Books

A CU scientist used forensic science and Photoshop to identify the remains of Everett Ruess, missing since 1934. (Photo by Dorothea Lange)

Amazing news today that CU scientist Dennis Van Gerven has identified the remains of Everett Ruess, the eccentric young vagabond who, with his two burros, disappeared in the Utah desert in 1934, leaving behind a short life, a few snapshots and a sheaf of letters and paintings that have inspired naturalists, environmentalists, wilderness lovers and one of my favorite songwriters.

I’m happy for Ruess’s family, which finally learns the answer to a mystery that must have vexed its members over the decades. And the discovery is an astonishing story that will no doubt show up as a future episode of CSI. The mystery was solved through a captivating combination of ancient oral Indian family history and modern-day forensics technology and Photoshop.

But I feel a twinge of sadness about the discovery, too.

I came across Dave Alvin’s song “Everett Ruess” while working at KCUV (remember Colorado’s Underground Voice?) in 2004 when Ashgrove, the album it first appeared on, was released. Ashgrove was, to these ears, a concept album, a group of songs loosely arranged around the concept of growing older and learning to accept that fate. The title track was an unabashed look back at the former Blasters’ guitarist/songwriter’s days at the storied Los Angeles folk club where, as an underage teenager, Alvin was schooled in the ways of the great blues and folk musicians who inspired him. “Nine-Volt Heart” is a nostalgic memory of an older man’s youth, and “Man in the Bed” a penetrating snapshot of an aging man in whose dreams he is a young man again.

But “Everett Ruess” sealed the deal for the concept. Alvin had obviously read Ruess’ letters, and his song, written in Ruess’s own voice, tells the young man’s story as he builds a case around a notion that nags us all as we age.

I was born Everett Ruess
I been dead for sixty years
I was just a young boy in my twenties
The day I disappeared.
Into the Grand Escalante Badlands
Near the Utah and Arizona line
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Ruess was twenty when he disappeared after leaving Escalante, Utah, in late 1934. But Alvin notes that among the many mysteries about Ruess is that there was no particular rebellion involved in his journeys. He wasn’t leaving because he wanted to get away from his family but because he found something particularly fascinating and illuminating about the wilderness.

I grew up in California
And I loved my family and my home
But I ran away to the High Sierra
Where I could live free and alone.

And folks said “He’s just another wild kid
And he’ll grow out of it in time,”
But they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Ruess traded prints with Ansel Adams, studied with Edward Weston, Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange and sent letters, drawings and poems of his travels to his friends and family beginning with his first Southwestern pilgrimage in June 1930. Though his 1934 journal wasn’t found, he never stopped writing. Were it not for those letters, nobody would have known or cared, and today’s newspaper headline would never been written.

I broke broncos with the cowboys
I sang healing songs with the Navajo
I did the snake dance with the Hopi
And I drew pictures everywhere I go.

Then I swapped all my drawings for provisions
To get what I needed to get by
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Alvin speculates convincingly upon Ruess’ continuing detachment from civilization.

Well I hate your crowded cities
With your sad and hopeless mobs
And I hate your grand cathedrals
Where you try to trap God.

‘Cause I know God is here in the canyons
With the rattlesnakes and the pinon pines
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Everett Ruess and his two burros prowled the desert Southwest in the early 1930's.

Ruess left Escalante, New Mexico, on November 11, 1934, and was last seen by two sheepherders near the Kaiparowits Plateau several days later, who reported that he said he was heading for the Hole-in-the Rock area, a Mormon landmark where the Colorado River could be crossed.

Ruess’s burros were found in Davis Gulch, and the search for his remains was centered in that remote area of the Escalante. Most theories were that he was killed by cattle wranglers, fell to his death, took his own life in that same area or on Kaiparowits Plateau or disappeared and is living in Mexico. One major problem with any benign death theory is that his paintings, paint kit, journal, cook kit, food and money were never found.

This lends further credence to the Ute Indian murder story. His body was buried about thirty miles east of the area where the burros were found and the search for Ruess took place, so he must have crossed the Colorado and headed toward Monument Valley, which he had visited before. Without his burros, food or supplies, it would be difficult but not impossible to reach the Bluff area where his body was finally found.

Alvin weaves in several theories about Ruess’ death before putting everything into context in his last eight lines.

They say I was killed by a drifter
Or I froze to death in the snow
Maybe mauled by a wildcat
Or I’m livin’ down in Mexico.

But my end, it doesn’t really matter
All that counts is how you live your life
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

You give your dreams away as you get older
Oh, but I never gave up mine
And they’ll never find my body, boys
Or understand my mind.

Billie and I visited Escalante, Utah, in 2005, where we first came into contact with the Ruess saga. There we bought Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, the W.L. Rusho biography that included his writings. At times we felt we were following him around the wild areas in Escalante where he went missing, all the while staring in majesty and wonder at the same mind-boggling vistas that captured his imagination.

Reading Ruess’s words, and Alvin’s poetry, especially the lines “all that counts is how you live your life,” “you give your dreams away as you get older” and “they’ll never find my body, boys, or understand my mind” put a spin on his story that I still find deeply compelling. I really liked the idea of Ruess being lost, and staying lost. One part of me wished that he would remain unfound, a mystery – “they never find my body, boys.” Today’s news means that I will now only be able to take comfort in knowing that we will still never “understand his mind.”

“It hit an iceberg, and it sank. Get over it.”
– Robert Ballard

One of the best books I have read recently was Shadow Divers: The True Adventures of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II. The book, a non-fiction story that combined deep-sea adventure, history and two divers caught up in a suspenseful search for the identity of a German U-boat they found sunk off the eastern coast of the United States, completely captured my imagination.

So I was pretty excited to see that John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, the two Shadow Divers, were partners in a new book, Titanic’s Last Secrets. My enthusiasm abated rather quickly as the book’s only secret is that it’s a cheap knock-off that does nothing more than fulfill a contract.

Titanic’s Last Secrets, written by Brad Matsen, wants to make us believe that the great ship actually sank because of faulty design and workmanship. We are supposed to believe this because Chatterton and Kohler, who became bigger fish in diving circles after the success of Shadow Divers and even had their own underwater television adventure show, decided to ride one of the submersibles down to the Titanic because an earlier traveler convinced them he saw part of the shattered hull.

After spending $150,000, the divers don’t find what they went down for, but on a subsequent dive, they discover two hull pieces. After a subsequent twenty-minute dive to Titanic’s sister ship, Brittanic, which sunk off the coast of Africa, and a search of the historic record, they conclude that Titanic was designed poorly and destined to fail.

Much of the joy of reading Shadow Divers was the way the evidence unfolded over several years of diving and research. Several times Chatterton and Kohler follow leads that, though promising enough to believe, wind up wrong, which makes the final identification that much more satisfying.

But there is no suspense in Titanic’s Last Secrets. The first sixty pages do a good job describing the process that led Chatterton and Kohler to the Titanic. Then, with no explanation, Matsen begins telling the story of Titanic’s last voyage, using historical accounts, with lots of innuendo about Bruce Ismay and the other owners of the giant ships. This interminable section takes up more than half of the book’s length before the story finally shifts back to Chatterton and Kohler and describes their theory that the ship didn’t sink as Robert Ballard or the James Cameron film version showed. To say their argument is unconvincing would be an understatement.

“They found a fragment, big deal. Am I surprised? No. When you go down there, there’s stuff all over the place.”
– Robert Ballard

Feb. 25, 2009

During World War II, Nazi U-boats, in a campaign of terrorism using stealth, mines and torpedoes, sank more than 3,000 ships. The Allies struck back with depth charges, radar and, after breaking the Enigma code, limited and ended the U-boat threat. By the end of the war, more than 50 percent of the fleet had been destroyed and 30,000 German seamen sent to watery graves.

Robert Kurson’s Shadow Divers: The True Adventures of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II tells the story of two deep-sea divers who become unlikely friends after discovering an unidentified German U-boat and some of those seamen in deep waters off the Massachusetts coast.

John Chatterton and Richie Kohler both become obsessed with finding the identity of U-Who, a wreck most divers avoid as hazardous and off-limits. Those fears aren’t idle ones: three men die during the examination of the wreck over a six-year period beginning in 1991, and Kurson’s underwater adventure chapters resonate with the experience of diving dangerous wrecks at depths where narcosis dulls the senses and one mistake can bring on a particularly terrifying death.

The underwater scenes are great, but the real story begins after Chatterton and Kohler begin to unravel the secret of which boat U-Who actually was and why it had been destroyed where it was found. The community that deep dives old wrecks are mostly concerned with recovering artifacts, and Kohler was part of a group of divers who prided themselves on how much they could take out of ships.

Both find skulls and bones and other personal memorabilia inside the U-boat, but even after several years of diving, nothing that can prove its identity. They comb wartime documents, read books on U-boats and their activities, tour the captured U-boat on display in Chicago and sought the services of every government office and historian, especially on the German side, they can find before finally stumbling onto the answer. Shadow Divers has as much as I can ask for in a book: a great story, a great adventure and a great mystery.

The famous Life magazine cover of the Andrea Doria listing dangerously before sinking.

The Life photos of lifeboats pulling away from the badly listing Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria before the ship finally drops below the gray waters in July 1956, were mesmerizing.  But much as the photographs moved me, I never knew much about the circumstances of the accident, in which the Swedish liner Stockholm broadsided the Doria, considered the finest trans-Atlantic luxury ship and the pride of the Italian post-war fleet, some fifty miles southeast of Nantucket. Blame was never really assessed – go figure. The Stockholm was far north of the traditional eastern ocean highway, it was foggy, and each ship made enough mistakes after seeing each other on radar to guarantee the final outcome.

While the Swedish-American ship, its prow a shattered pile of rubble, made its way back to New York, the Doria, eleven hours after the collision, turned over onto its right and sank in more than two hundred feet of water. Forty-seven people were killed, all in the collision, but more than a thousand people made it to New York safely onboard several ships, including the Stockholm, in a great rescue effort before the Doria went down.

Among those rescued was Mike Stoller, whose name immediately caught this rock critter’s eye while reading Richard Goldstein’s Desperate Hours: The Epic Rescue of the Andrea Doria (Wiley & Son 2001), a knuckle-gripping, journalistic account of the accident and rescue effort.

Stoller and his partner, Jerry Leiber, had gotten an unexpected royalty check of $5,000 when Edith Piaf recorded their “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” for French release, and Stoller, 22, and his new wife, Meryl, were returning from a three-month vacation in France. They were both rescued, drenched but unharmed, from the Doria.  Goldstein relates that Leiber was there to greet them when they finally came ashore with some big news.

“We have a hit record: ‘Hound Dog.’ ”

Big Mama Thornton had recorded the song in 1953.  “You mean the Big Mama record,” asked Stoller. “No. Some kid named Elvis Presley.”

“Hound Dog,” paired with “Don’t be Cruel” on a single 45, would become the most popular two-sided single of all time, and Leiber and Stoller would go on to write a myriad of famous rock ‘n’roll hits, including “Love Potion #9,” “On Broadway” and “Stand by Me.”

I always wondered how Life got all those incredible photos of the Doria disaster. As it turns out, Life publisher Andrew Heiskell and Life photographer Loomis Dean, were both onboard the Ile de France, another cruise ship heading to Europe that became a rescue vehicle. Dean took the dramatic photos that stirred my imagination, while Heiskell turned reporter, interviewing people as they were brought onboard the Ile de France.

But the Doria story didn’t end with its sinking, and the ship, even as a wreck, continues to take lives. I knew nothing about this until this week when I read Deep Descent: Adventure and Death Diving the Andrea Doria (Pocket Books, 2001).

Author Kevin McMurry is a journalist and diver, and he tells the story of how the Doria, which sits deep enough and is unstable enough to make it among the most dangerous of dives, has become a kind of Mt. Everest for underwater divers. At 225 feet, the limits of human endurance are tested every second, and only the most technical of divers are even supposed to be allowed on the wreck. The book was written in 2001, but the story continues; the latest Doria fatality was just four months ago.

Divers continue to die trying to bring up a memento of the Andrea Doria.

In many respects, the book reminded me of Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest’s Most Controversial Year (Henry Holt, 2008), Nick Heil’s account of the disastrous 2006 Everest climbing season, when eleven people died. Like Deep Descent, it is a tale of those who do things most of the rest of us wouldn’t. Some die because of a medical condition exaggerated by being too deep in the water or too high on the mountain. But most perish because they didn’t pay attention to their equipment, took unnecessary chances in a treacherous place or simply thought they couldn’t die.

The most dramatic stories, though, involve divers eager to grab items from the wreck, especially dinnerware, which leads to a curious, often fatal “disease” known to aficionados as “china fever.” It was hard not to compare those who have died trying to bring up booty, despite the warnings and death around them, with Wall Street financiers in the last couple of years, diving again and again for that one final treasure  — until they realize the air is running out and they’re still on the bottom.

(Read the gripping first chapter of Deep Descent.)

I love books about people who do things that I wouldn’t. Whether it is Lynne Cox, who swam a mile in freezing Antarctic waters, the mountaineers who climb into air thin enough to stop bodily functions or the astronauts of Apollo 13 returning to earth in a crippled spacecraft, I am fascinated by these exploits.

Candace Millard’s The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey certainly fits into this category. I knew nothing of the former president’s trip down an uncharted Amazon tributary called, aptly, the River of Doubt, after his final political defeat in 1912. As Millard tells it, tribulation, poor planning and a hostile environment led the expedition to a place that killed expedition members and seriously taxed Roosevelt’s survival skills. He would never really recover, and the journey would contribute to his death six years later at age sixty.

Millard paints the story vividly, drawing on journals, accounts, books and photography. Here comes the famous American ex-president, Theodore Roosevelt, and Col. Candido Rondon, Brazil’s most celebrated explorer and a national hero, to navigate and chart a river never before navigated.

Millard makes us feel what it would have been like to spend six weeks in an environment almost completely hostile to humans. Her descriptions of Amazonian ecology and evolution bring you into this colorful, alien world, which, at least in the first days, brought only awe and admiration from the travelers. “Far from its outward appearance, the rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite,” Millard writes. “Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary but, rather, a the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”

Without giving anything away, those inhabitants — flora, fauna, reptiles, insects, mammals, fish, and a formidable aboriginal tribe – and the weather gather in a kind of perfect storm of a story that I couldn’t put down until I finished. Billie said it right when she handed it to me after she had finished it, “It’s a page-turner.”

Slinky.

The original Slinky, 60 years later: "Nothing to wind ... nothing to wear out."

Just mention the word, and almost everyone holds out his or her hands, palms up, and bounces them up and down, imagining Slinky’s back-and-forth motion and the shifting “slinky” sound. Its 80 feet of coiled steel spring jiggles, shuffles, bounces and stretches back and forth between the hands. It “walks” down stairsteps, with the momentum of its weight propelling its shiny coils end over end.

I mention this after reading this morning that Betty James, keeper of the Slinky, the first real Baby Boomer toy, died Thursday in Hollidaysburg, Pa., where Slinkys are still made. She was 90.

Although it’s been sold in all sorts of variations and materials, the basic Slinky remains virtually unchanged. It is the perfect toy, self-contained, easy to manufacture, inexpensive to buy and endlessly fascinating to children and adults alike.

When Gil Asakawa and I began writing The Toy Book in 1989, we flew to New York in February to attend the Toy Fair, the annual gathering of toymakers. And there we met Betty James. She was 71 at the time, bright and clever and full of life. Several of her sons, salesmen for the company, were there with her. I don’t remember anybody else we met that day in the halls of toy companies, but I will never forget Mrs. James.

She told us the story of how her then-husband, Richard, a civilian naval engineer working for a shipyard in 1943, noticed a torsion spring aboard a ship he was inspecting fall off a table and wiggle and bounce back and forth.

Amused, he took it home to study it. He figured he could make the spring bounce down stairs and perhaps manufacture one and sell it as a toy. It took two more years before the Jameses formed James Industries. When the spring was perfected, it needed a name. Betty flipped through a dictionary and stopped at a word she thought suited the coiled spring.

The toy didn’t sell well until the Gimbel Brothers set up a sloping board that allowed Slinky to “walk” in the front windows of their department store. They haven’t stopped selling since.

In 1959, Richard James became a missionary in Bolivia, leaving Betty, her six children and James Industries to fend for themselves. Betty told us how she took over the company, and she was still running it forty years later. “We get calls to buy the company almost every day,” she said with a knowing smile. She was proud of the fact that Slinky was the perfect toy — simple, inexpensive and imaginative – and that it had provided her family with a good life.

We needed a starting place for The Toy Book, and we walked away from our meeting with Mrs. James with exactly that. The place to begin a book about baby-boom toys was with Slinky, which came on the market in 1945, arguably the first year of what became known as the Baby Boom, and with entrepreneurs like the Jameses. Technology was reshaping American life after the end of WWII, and Slinky, like Silly Putty (a byproduct of the effort to find a synthetic substitute for rubber), Frisbee and Hula Hoops (both made of the new post-war material, plastic) were perfect examples of that shift.

James Industries was finally sold — to POOF Products in 1998 — and Betty James was deservedly inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame. You might not remember her name, but you will remember her toy.

What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs
And makes a slinkity sound?
A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing,
Everyone knows it’s Slinky.
It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky.
For fun it’s a wonderful toy,
It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky
It’s fun for a girl and a boy.

This photo of Charlie Parker is now online at the LIFE photo archive.

LIFE magazine played a crucial part in my coming of age. Starting in the mid-1950s LIFE’s pictures and stories brought indelible images of barely imagined places into the home of a nerdy, Midwest kid every week.

LIFE strapped me into the cramped flight seats of the Mercury capsules and gave me access to the front rows of major league baseball parks. Its photography took me down the gritty streets of Southern cities where water hoses beat down black people and behind the gates of posh hideaways of the rich and famous. Its bold visual style and vast entourage of international photo-correspondents brought height and depth into my otherwise flatlander’s world view, allowing me entry into places that before had been nothing more than dots on a map.

Given that some magazines today are giving up their print editions, it’s hard to believe what a impact LIFE had on this country. Back then when newspapers used few photos (and no color), radio consisted of one or two AM stations playing the same Top 40 tunes and television news was more experiment than reality on the three major networks, LIFE pictured a world I didn’t know existed.

I loved the magazine, and many articles and images from those days left deep impressions. The body of Pope Pius XII lying in state at the Vatican sheathed in what looked like plastic wrap. Alan Shepard bounding up the steps of an aircraft carrier after America’s first suborbital flight. John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his late father at his funeral. A hippie toking on a red, white and blue joint. The bodies of Americans stacked up in Vietnam. A black woman and her daughter drinking from the Negroes Only fountain. All images indelibly etched on my mind and soul.

That powerful segregation image was taken by a LIFE photographer who also authored a photo essay in the late 1950s based around a sickly teen-age boy, Flavio, and his poverty-stricken family in the dingy barrio above the glittering Rio de Janeiro gold coast.

I was already familiar with Rio’s gorgeous natural setting, and seeing the stark black-and-white photos of Flavio’s ghetto literally changed the way I saw the world. His thin face haunted me, bored its way into my very consciousness. It was a sobering recognition: “You mean not everybody in the world lives the way I do?”

I remembered the photographer’s name, Gordon Parks, when I saw it attached later to his LIFE photos of Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers, his autobiographical novel The Learning Tree and as director of the blaxploitation movie Shaft.

I got to thinking about LIFE after spending some time with the new LIFE photo archive hosted by Google. Now, in Google Image, if you type in a word and then source:life, it will bring up images from the magazine. There is also an image labeler function that allows anyone to label images to improve the quality of search results (and it could use better tags.)

What a mind-blower. Google says it wants to eventually put all LIFE photos on online, but it is starting with photos from the archives never seen before. I couldn’t find some of the photos I remembered, like the amazing shot of Charles Starkweather grinning like James Dean after his murder spree across the West, but there were a set of photos from the event. I was only able to find Parks’ outtakes of the Flavio story, most of the boy on the plane to Denver to be examined by a doctor, not the ones shot in Rio that straightened me upright. But it is a hell of a start: two million of a total of ten million photos.

Back in the 1990s, Parks, at 84 as charismatic a person as I’ve ever seen, was in Boulder as part of “Looking at LIFE: Rethinking America’s Favorite Magazine,” organized by then CU professor and author Erika Doss, editor of Looking at LIFE Magazine, a wonderful collection of essays about the magazine.

Besides listening to Parks’ inspiring words, participants and scholars talked about the way the magazine covered politics, foreign policy, the space race, religion, sports, fashion and women from its inception in 1936 through World War II, including seminal events like the atomic bomb, the Cold War, the space race, the civil rights movement, the counterculture, rock’n’roll and the Vietnam War.

Besides Parks’ appearance, the high point for me came during a talk by renowned LIFE reporter and editor Richard Stolley, (and the man who bought the Abraham Zapruder film of the JFK assassination for the magazine). He  was asked whether the magazine did marketing or demographic research to decide what went on its pages.

Naw, said Stolley. The staff felt that it was on a mission, and a monstrously good one at that. “We were too arrogant,” he said, to cater LIFE to its readers’ whims. The magazine’s far-flung correspondents and editors chose stories without regard for the bottom line.

Because LIFE’s editors were “arrogant” enough to believe in what they were doing instead of trying to give its audience what it wanted, the magazine crossed over into every strata of American culture. There has been no magazine like it since. And we could surely use more of that journalistic arrogance today.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is set in a grim future where sunlight is blotted out by dark ash clouds. All bird and animal life dead. No history. No future. Cold winds tear at the tattered rags of a man and his son, walking the road, their filthy possessions in a squeaking grocery cart, waywardly following a worn, torn map to someplace near the coast that might be warm.

As they watch unspeakable horror, all the two have is each other.

No chapters. No headings. Just sharply drawn vignettes of life on that grim road. Vignettes that, in McCarthy’s stingy language, offer us the pure essence of humanity in the ruins.

The Road, Cormac McCarthy (Vintage International, 287 pp)

Arborists consider a tree that has never been climbed a wild tree. There are still a lot of wild trees on earth, but none as massive or mysterious as the remnant of coastal redwoods tucked away in Northern California.

I hadn’t thought much about the redwoods until I read a long Richard Preston piece in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. It was one of those stories that only the New Yorker dares publish in today’s quick-bite magazine world: you know, 15,000 words on redwoods. Huh?

I especially love reading about places I’m not likely to visit. “My goal is to reveal people and realms that nobody had ever imagined,” Preston writes in the foreword to The Wild Trees. A climber himself, Preston obliges by taking us into a world – the upper crowns, or canopies, of super-tall trees – that is so old and inaccessible that we know almost nothing about it. And he tells a tale of “passion and daring,” how a small group of people led by Stephen Sillett and Marie Antoine (who were married in a redwood) wound up studying the tops of the world’s oldest and largest living things. Their names seem to fit their stature: Telperion, Adventure, Stratosphere Giant, Zeus, Lost Monarch, Helios.

There are only about a hundred and twenty coastal redwoods that are more than 350 feet tall. We think they were once worldwide, but today they exist only in several small state parks and one national park. The locations of the tallest trees are carefully guarded botanist secrets. Scientists guess that the oldest are between two and three thousand years old, or as Preston says, “roughly the age of the Parthenon.”

From the ground redwood crowns, which encompass only the upper one third or less of redwoods, are completely out of sight, visible only from above or by climbing inside. This area, which scientists considered a “redwood desert” before we actually began poking around in them, includes entire ecosystems, with flora and fauna that live their entire lives in the canopy, which even has its own water storage system.

It is a strange world, filled with deadly obstacles like broken branches that can weigh several tons and sometimes crash to the earth, and filled with incredible beauty. Bonsai versions of redwoods grow from upper branches. Fern gardens take roots in soil that has somehow made its way into cavities 300 feet above the earth. Redwoods are tough trees, pretty much fire-resistant, and there are fire caves large enough to stand in and flying squirrels that have never seen humans before leaping from tree to tree.

I work in downtown Denver, so I looked up some building heights to get an idea of how large these trees actually are. The historic May D&F Tower, at 330 feet, is just below the lower end of the giant redwood scale. Hyperion tree, which was discovered and climbed for the first time in 2006, is, at 379 feet, just less than ten feet shorter than the building where I work, the Bank One Tower at 17th and Curtis streets. Think about that the next time you walk the 17th Street Mall!

Preston uses what he calls a “narrative non-fiction” style, going into great detail about how the lives of Sillett, Antoine and the others who came to this strange calling converged in the redwood forests. I got antsy reading so much personal detail in the first sixty or seventy pages. But every time Preston took me up into the upper canopy, I couldn’t put the book down.

As gearhead Preston reminds us, technology has played its part in the evolution of canopy science. One of the reasons we are able to study these tall trees is that the arborist climbing techniques that professionals use have advanced to that point only in the last couple of decades.

The Wild Trees is illustrated with line drawings that are incredible in their own right. But as I was reading, I longed for photographs of the canopies themselves. I Googled “Richard Preston” and wound up at his web site, which includes, among other things, a gallery of amazing color photos that further boggles my imagination. Given that printing photos like this would double the price of the book, it’s an excellent example of how the Internet can enhance the enjoyment of books rather than being considered a threat to their existence.