Reviewed for The Wilderness Record, publication of the California Wilderness Coalition.

Most California environmentalists are familiar with the works of David Rains Wallace, having read his award-winning The Klamath Knot, the superb natural history of the greater Siskiyou region, or The Turquoise Dragon, an enchanting eco-thriller that takes the reader from the Bay Area to the Trinity Alps and Kalmiopsis wilderness areas. If you enjoyed these or a dozen other of his books, you will appreciate The Monkey's Bridge.

Wallace's latest natural history treatise looks at the region that linked North and South America some three million years ago and the amazing mix of flora and fauna that surged back and forth across this land bridge. His knack for bringing an region to life makes it a delight to learn about hundreds of species, volcanoes, plate tectonics, and gomphotheres.

But Wallace tells more of the story than just the natural history. He begins with the adventurers who sailed from Europe and conquered some, but definitely not all of the native peoples of Central America. Next are those trying to find a shortcut from the Alantic to the Pacific, including the French attempt to build a canal at a cost of an estimated 22,000 lives. He then brings in the naturalists, from those with the first explorers to Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace.

Much of the story is embedded in geology. The fossil record in North and South America led evolutionists to recognize the importance of this land bridge, and the revolutionary theory of plate tectonics gave us the mechanism to explain how the bridge formed.

But what really brings this book alive is that Wallace has been there, from his first three-month journey in 1971, a return in 1987 for a "gaudy bird-watching trip," and repeat visits during the last decade. He climbs the volcanoes, claws through the dense rain forests, and snorkels the coral reefs. "Big marine toads plopped in and out, acorn woodpeckers called 'Kraaaa! Kraaa' in the pines, and a flock of parakeets flew shrieking overhead," he colorfully writes.

As you surely imagine, this is not a totally happy tale. Wallace discusses the "island ecology" theories of habitat fragmentation and loss of species. He mentions the recent extinction of the flightless, grebe-like poc and the golden toad and recounts the decline of the harpy eagle. But he also describes efforts to reverse this loss of habitat through programs like Paseo Pantera ("the path of the panther") that is a major element of The Wildlands Project's strategy to protect the biodiversity of the North American continent.

Wallace clearly is in awe of the complexity and diversity of the Central American rain forest. "Sometimes I think the human language, or simply human mentality, hasn't evolved yet to the point where tropical rain forest is comprehensible or describable," he writes.

But with The Monkey's Bridge, Wallace has made a great start.

Gives great information for the beginner traveler that is looking for the right place to travel to.

Some of the most beautiful pictures i've EVER seen in a book.. photo after photo of each destination as well as the area's wildlife! superb!

If you value field guides, you will love this Time-Life edition of "The Walker's Companion" from The Nature Company. Several highly respected nature writers, including David Rains Wallace and Ann Zwinger, make contributions to this well-illustrated and highly informative text. Those names should give you a clue to the excellent combination of literary and scientific writing that makes this text a must-have reference for anyone who is interested in the environment.

This is a field guide that powerfully combines content with context in a way that makes the information about nature and the environment not only highly accessible, but intrinsically linked to the key social topics that are central issues in both science and social studies. Topics include the history of nature writing and in America, hiking tips, the study of nature throughout the ages, field identification and sketching outdoors. Ecological concepts such as food chains and pollination are concisely described and illustrated in a section titled, "Understanding Nature". Information about every ecosystem from forests, mountains and deserts to farmland and vacant lots is included in the "Guide to Habitats" section. This kind of comprehensive perspective about environment helps the reader to think about and see ecology in very relevant ways.

The format of double-facing pages per topic gives concise environmental information, making it easy to read, index and apply to the reader's world. The guide is an essential home or travel reference as well as a valuable classroom text that would be interesting and accessible for audiences from 10 to 100. The text is so versatile that I have a copy for myself and have ordered a class set for my middle school students for a wide range of class use including nature drawing, research, gardening and environmental education.

Wallace is first an explorer, then a writer. He explores the wild places of the Kalamath Mountains, from the "wonder of dreams" of the upper canyons of the Chetco River, to the scrubby peaks of the Siskiyou and fits it all together in a fasinating evolutionary story. I have explored many of these same areas and found this work to best capture that feeling of being in truely wild places. Read it, then go explore!

Wallace takes on evolution (and the way we were taught about it) the way Annie Dillard lifted the veil over nature in "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek": you are forced to replace the myths with a newer, even more mysterious understanding. Ironically, the theory of Sasquatch is retold as common-sensical, scientific fact. The steelhead trout, in fact, comes across as the greater nystery!

I count this book among my all-time favorites, a sort of heir apparent to "Walden."

Inviting book that made you want to visit the Klamath Mountains and learn about the wild plants of any forest system.

Rather than presenting just another account of the infamous Cope-Marsh "fossil war," Wallace has placed the conflict in a journalistic context, exploring the role New York Herald editor/huckster James Gordon Bennett played in the animosity between the two great paleontologists. A wonderfully detailed and readable book, with only a very small number of minor scientific errors to detract from its value. This probably won't be remembered as the definitive work on the subject, but it's a good place to start.

This marvelous volume by David Rains Wallace is a balanced, thorough, and insightful recounting of the greatest, most needless, and most tragic scientific conflict in American history: the Cope-Marsh feud. I say "balanced" because most writers, especially those with an environmentalist/naturalist bent like Wallace, have tended to side with Othniel C. Marsh over Edward D. Cope. The reason isn't hard to find. Cope's feud with Marsh eventually [pulled] into the controversy John Wesley Powell, a major benefactor to Marsh and impediment to Cope, and occasioned Powell's fall from power. Environmentalists rightly consider this a tragedy, because perhaps no one in American history possessed the depth of understanding about the geological and geographical logic of the entire area west of the hundredth meridian than Powell. Had Powell remained in power longer, perhaps many of the great tragedies associated with the development of the American West could have been avoided. Most other evaluators of the feud tend to be biographers of either Cope or Marsh, and those side with their subject. But Wallace is able to look beyond the effect the Cope-Marsh feud's effect on Powell and beyond partisan loyalty to any single participant to achieve a fair evaluation of each.

Wallace begins with a biographical narrative of both Cope and Marsh, from their family origins and early interest in science, to their maturation as paleontologists and their initial encounters with one another, and on to their growing competition with one another and eventual implacable conflicts and feud. Wallace shows how this really was not primarily a scientific controversy, but a conflict between two very different personalities. Both men were exceedingly gifted, both immensely competitive, and both were extremely neurotic. Of the two, Cope emerges as the more sympathetic, if only because he strikes the reader as the more likable of the two. Marsh is less sympathetic because of the ruthless way he attempts to cut Cope off from all governmental support for his research, and the manner in which he attempts to keep Cope, who was probably the more gifted paleontologist, on the scientific periphery. In fact, Marsh comes across as a completely unlikable person; not even his closest acquaintances seem to have liked him. If Cope emerges as more congenial, he also comes across as more manic, more paranoid, and obsessed.

In the end, one is left with a feeling of disgust at both Marsh (especially Marsh) and Cope's massive stupidity in the entire conflict. Although they had some scientific disagreements, most of their antagonism was generated by who was able to get the most fossils, and the efforts of Marsh to cut Cope completely out of government funding. One is left with a sense of regret that the two great founders of American paleontology were unable to coordinate their efforts and be collaborators instead of competitors.

Anyone enjoying this book might also enjoy Deborah Cadbury's TERRIBLE LIZARD, which tells the story of the birth of paleontology in England at the beginning of the 19th century, a few decades before Cope and Marsh. Sadly, that book also tells the story of a needless feud, with Gideon Mantell taking the Cope role and Richard Owen the Marsh one. The two books make great companion volumes, and jointly make a magnificent introduction to 19th century paleontology.

Each chapter is about a day's adventure of one of the animals (Weasel, Sierra Grouse, Chickaree, Black Bear, Lizard, Coyote, Deer Mouse, Stellar Jay & Mule Deer)on the rock and surrounding forests and meadows. Sally Carrighar compresses her observations into one day and weaves a fine tale of the hunts, escapes, games and imagined thoughts of each animal.

This book, written from the point of view of each of a series of animals living around Beetle Rock, follows the web of life and illustrates the beauty of the natural world. This is a book for anyone seeking to understand the natural world, and anyone who truly loves animals.

If you want to get a real feel for the place without falling asleep, save your money. The author takes an otherwise fascinating subject (the outdoors Central America) and, using lifeless prose, makes you wonder why you were ever interested in CA in the first place. Hotel listings are scant, as is specific information about destinations. No picutres or maps. Possibly good information about hiking, but not much on the safefy of such excursions. The Let's Go guidebook has more specific info (though not only on the outdoors) and is much more enjoyable to read.

I live in Nicaragua -- can only comment on that location. This book is just ok to suppliment. Buy Lonely Plant Central America for detail (its better then the Rough Guide).

Hi, I am working at ILISA Spanish Language Institute in San Jose, Costa Rica and I just want to let you know that this book help our students a lot by giving them helpful tips and by making any travel plans for the weekends. Thanks!

At its very best, nature writing lets us experience vicariously an environment that we're unlikely to ever encounter ourselves and, simultaneously, sets us to thinking about that environment in new or unusual ways. David Rains Wallace succeeds only in the first of these tasks.

Bulow Hammock is a wooded swampland in eastern Florida, around Daytona. Wallace, whose grandmother lived in nearby Ormond-by-the-Sea, has been visiting it since he was a child. In this book he writes, often compellingly about what he has observed there and he relates his own experiences to those of the great naturalist John James Audubon, who seems to have hated the place, and those of William Bartram, whose 1701 book, , was apparently influential in the development of Romanticism. So far, so good.

But, in addition, Wallace throughout tries to prove a rather dubious premise : that the human brain and the hammock have many similarities :

I wondered if I might explore the hammock not only as a home of wild plants and animals but as a connection to my wayward brain. The brain is like forests in being diverse and multilayered. I'd even felt in the western mountains that the old-growth forests might have a kind of consciousness arising from complexity. Like my brain, the hammock was structured hierarchically, with newer, more complex things growing from older ones. Most mysteriously, brain and hammock shared a propensity for mimesis, for producing similarities between different things.

This whole train of thought, which starts out merely silly, eventually trails off into pure blather. The desire of environmentalists and their allies to anthropomorphize nature is perfectly understandable--the more human that nature is made to appear the more likely we are to protect it. But here's one thing we can all be certain of, the trees of Bulow Hammock do not have a consciousness; they don't actually realize that they are a forest. Nature is fascinating enough without our overreaching to draw human connections which simply do not exist.

These rather dubious speculations on Wallace's part end up detracting from the book, rather than adding to it. I'd still recommend it for the beauty and wit of his observations, but it fails rather spectacularly in the reach for broader themes.

GRADE : C+