Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow + other work (10 books)

WADE DAVIS (b. 1953) is a Canadian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and photographer.  A professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”

His work has largely focused on worldwide indigenous cultures, and has taken him around the globe to live alongside indigenous people, documenting their cultural practices in books, photographs, and film.  He has published some 1800 popular articles on subjects ranging from Amazonian myth and religion to the traditional use of psychotropic drugs.

Davis spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes living among indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations, collecting and studying plants, and their uses as food, medicine, and in religious ceremonies.  His work later took him to Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombies — people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after being officially declared dead and buried.  Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti itself — from the African origins of its people to the successful Haitian independence movement, down to the present day, where vodoun culture is, in effect, the government of Haiti’s countryside.  His research was presented in two remarkable books: THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1985) , which became an international bestseller, and PASSAGE OF DARKNESS (1988) .

Davis parlays his sense of wonder into passionate concern over the rate at which cultures and languages are disappearing — 50 percent of the world's 7,000 languages, he says, are no longer taught to children.  He argues that language is much more than vocabulary and grammatical rules.  Every language is “an old-growth forest of the mind.”

“Indigenous cultures are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us.  They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?  When asked this question, the peoples of the world respond in 7,000 different voices, and these collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species over the coming centuries.”

His most recent book, MAGDALENA: RIVER OF DREAMS (2020) , illuminates Colombia's complex past, present, and future through the story of the great Río Magdalena.


The following books are in ePUB and/or PDF format as indicated:

* Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory & Conquest of Everest (Knopf, 2011) — ePUB + PDF
* Light at the Edge of the World (D & M, 2007) — ePUB + PDF
* Magdalena: River of Dreams (Knopf, 2020) — ePUB
* One River: Explorations & Discoveries in the Amazon (Simon & Schuster, 1996) — ePUB
* Passage of Darkness: Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (North Carolina, 1988) — PDF
* River Notes: A Natural & Human History of the Colorado (Island Press, 2013) — ePUB
* Sacred Headwaters (Greystone, 2012) — PDF
* Serpent and the Rainbow, The (Simon & Schuster, 1985) — ePUB
* Shadows in the Sun: Landscapes of Spirit and Desire (Island Press, 1998) — ePUB + PDF
* Wayfinders, The: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (Anansi, 2009)

____________________________________________________________________________


If you like these books and want others to have access to them, please consider helping to seed this torrent.  The more you seed, the longer the torrent will live, and the easier it will be for me to upload new content.  Thank you!