First Paperback Edition
Subtitle: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia
Author: David G. Campbell
Subject: Health / Medicine
Paper ISBN 0-8135-4052-6
Pages: 288 pages. 8 b&w photographs; 3 maps
Publication Date: March 2007

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

"A fluent and highly intelligent book."-Joe Kane, Orion Magazine

"No writer I know so seamlessly and beautifully blends insightful science with powerful language. A Land of Ghosts is a staggering elegy for peoples and other species broken on the rack of dubious progress, a travelogue of the most engaging sort, and a testament to the acute sensibilities of one our greatest scientist-writers."-Robert Michael Pyle

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.

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.