A century ago, malaria was killing Washingtonians, Londoners, Parisians. Today HIV, along with various cancers, has taken its place among worldwide epidemics. Quinine, extracted from the cinchona tree of the Amazonian rainforest, quelled malaria; alkaloids taken from trees in the West African rainforest may well yield a cure for AIDS. Yet those woods, Mark Plotkin tells us, are fast disappearing, along with the native peoples who know the powers of the plants that dwell there. His account of wandering through the Amazonian jungles focuses on local knowledge about plants, whose uses range from the mundane to the magical. The rainforests of the world, Plotkin notes, are our greatest natural resource, an intercultural pharmacy that can cure woes both known and yet unvisited.


From Publishers Weekly
Ethnobotanist Plotkin details the alternative medicines he discovered during an apprenticeship to the shamans of the Amazon rainforests. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-Plotkin is a scientist who lived with indigenous tribes in the Amazon areas of Guyana and Suriname in order to learn about their native plants and how they use them medicinally. This book covers the 10 years during which he visited isolated villages and recorded their plant lore. Amid tales of adventure and descriptions of exotic wildlife and scenery, the author emphasizes how the coming of modern society has unalterably changed these societies. Young people have lost interest in the traditional way of life and the shamans have no one to whom they can pass on their valuable knowledge. He discusses companies and organizations that are working to return some drug-sale profits to the Indians, establish shaman apprentice programs among the tribes, and preserve this valuable habitat. An absorbing book that goes miles beyond the mass market "save the rain forest" campaign to explain this important issue to teens.Penny Stevens, Fairfax Public Library, VACopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
While living in the tropical rain forest with several Amazonian Indian tribes, Plotkin, currently a vice president of ethnobotany at Conservation International, observed and recorded the use of plants by the villagers and their shamans for food, medicines, poison arrows, and ritualistic hallucinogens. The result is a compelling, insightful narrative that whisks the reader into a time and place where plants, animals, and indigenous societies coexist. The encroachment of Western civilization threatens this existence, adding urgency to the author's contention that we must conserve tropical species, preserve the tribal knowledge of plants, and fund medical research on tropical plants that may yield new disease-fighting compounds. A skillful blend of travel adventure, botanical and cultural history, and Amazonian research. For all libraries.- Teresa Elberson, Lafayette P.L., La.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
In a captivating plea for more effective management of the rain forest's botanical, medicinal, and cultural resources, the chief ethnobotanist at Conservation International vividly recalls his apprenticeships to the tribal shamanic healers of the northeast Amazon. ``There exists no shortage of `wonder drugs' waiting to be found in the rain forests,'' says Plotkin, yet ``we know little or nothing about the chemical composition of 98.6% of the Brazilian flora''--and this despite the fact that, even now, the value of medicines derived from tropical plants is more than $6 billion a year. Inspired by a 1974 Harvard night-school lecture by famed ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, Plotkin first traveled to the rain forest in 1979. There, he was shocked to discover that local Indians' priceless botanical knowledge, developed over thousands of years, was threatened with eradication because no younger tribal members would volunteer as apprentice healers. Plotkin presented himself as an unlikely student to the Tirio and Wayana shamans, offering in exchange to write down what he was taught, thereby preserving the shamanic lore. When not following his elderly instructors through the forest, collecting plant samples and scribbling notes on native cures for arthritis, skin funguses, colds, and other ailments, Plotkin benefited personally from a successful shamanic healing; learned a secret formula for curare poison; and otherwise became deeply enmeshed in tribal life. In the States, he contractually assigned a percentage of any future profits from development of his research to the tribes that had disclosed the plants' healing powers, as well as to the countries in which the plants grow. Meanwhile, his book of botanical lore, presented as promised to the tribes, has helped restore a self- respect battered during years of interaction with the West. ``Every time a shaman dies, it is as if a library burned down,'' Plotkin reminds us. No one could convey the potential tragedy of this statement more convincingly than this author, who has done something to remedy it. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

Western medicine is only just beginning to value the curative powers of plants and herbs found in the Amazon rain forests. The story of ethnobotanist Mark Plotkins's apprenticeship with shaman wise men of the area is truly an anthropological adventure, that also vividly clarifies what destruction of the rain forests may ultimately cost humanity. Photos.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For thousands of years, healers have used plants to cure illness. Aspirin, the world's most widely used drug, is based on compounds originally extracted from the bark of a willow tree, and more than a quarter of medicines found on pharmacy shelves contain plant compounds. Now Western medicine, faced with health crises such as AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, has begun to look to the healing plants used by indigenous peoples to develop powerful new medicines. Nowhere is the search more promising than in the Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest, home to a quarter of all botanical species on this planet - as well as hundreds of Indian tribes whose medicinal plants have never been studied by Western scientists. In Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin recounts his travels and studies with some of the most powerful Amazonian shamans, who taught him the plant lore their tribes have spent thousands of years gleaning from the rain forest. For more than a decade, Dr. Plotkin has raced against time to harvest and record new plants before the rain forests' fragile ecosystems succumb to overdevelopment - and before the Indians abandon their own culture and learning for the seductive appeal of Western material culture. Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice relates nine of the author's quests, taking the reader along on a wild odyssey as he participates in healing rituals; discovers the secret of curare, the lethal arrow poison that kills in minutes; tries the hallucinogenic snuff epena that enables the Indians to speak with their spirit world; and earns the respect and fellowship of the mysterious shamans as he proves that he shares both their endurance and their reverence for the rain forest. Mark Plotkin combines the Darwinian spirit of the great writer-explorers of the nineteenth century - curious, discursive, and rigorously scientific - with a very modern concern for the erosion of our environment and the vanishing culture of native peoples.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Ethnobotanist Plotkin details the alternative medicines he discovered during an apprenticeship to the shamans of the Amazon rainforests. (Aug.)

Library Journal

While living in the tropical rain forest with several Amazonian Indian tribes, Plotkin, currently a vice president of ethnobotany at Conservation International, observed and recorded the use of plants by the villagers and their shamans for food, medicines, poison arrows, and ritualistic hallucinogens. The result is a compelling, insightful narrative that whisks the reader into a time and place where plants, animals, and indigenous societies coexist. The encroachment of Western civilization threatens this existence, adding urgency to the author's contention that we must conserve tropical species, preserve the tribal knowledge of plants, and fund medical research on tropical plants that may yield new disease-fighting compounds. A skillful blend of travel adventure, botanical and cultural history, and Amazonian research. For all libraries.-- Teresa Elberson, Lafayette P.L., La.

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