"Written in a clear and engaging style, Mark Plotkin's book on the Amazon comes at a crucial time, as more and more of Amazonia's forests are exploited and destroyed and as indigenous leaders, traditional guardians of the forest, are silenced. I could not recommend it more highly." -- Jane Goodall

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 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.

"The thrilling account of the 13 years Plotkin, vice-president of Ethnobotany at Conservation International in Washington, spent in the northeastern Amazon's primeval rain forest is a first-rate travel and adventure tale in which scientific lore, passionate advocacy of conservation and literary gifts are combined. Thanks to the trust and friendship the author inspired among the declining number of powerful shamans ("witch doctors") and other Indians who considered him a "harmless oddball," they welcomed him at tribal rituals and assisted him in identifying plants (60,000 yet unknown species, used to treat ills from testicular cancer to earache). They even shared secrets for making curare poison and other hallucinogens (which he tried). The author has also succeeded in having the indigenous people share in the profits from their plant-derived wonder drugs, and encouraged them to preserve their heritage of botanic lore and customs. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc." —Publishers Weekly

In a Tirio village deep in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, the shaman Nahtahlah has a place of honor in his tribe. Young Kamanya wants to learn the healing secrets of the forest plants--he hopes that he, too, will become the tribe’s shaman, so that he can cure his people. When the villagers fall sick with an illness that Nahtahlah cannot cure, many lose faith in the shaman’s wisdom--until a foreign woman helps them understand its value while giving Kamanya an opportunity to realize his dream. Lynne Cherry returns to the rain forest with ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin to tell an important story about the healing plants of the earth-and why we must protect them.

"Cherry's watercolors are filled with flora and fauna and reveal her appreciation for this environment and its people." -School Library Journal

Vanity Fair staff writer Shnayerson (The Car That Could, 1996, etc.) and ethnobotanist Plotkin (Medicine Quest, 2000, etc.) document the consternation of doctors as they face a dismaying fact: drugs that once banished infectious diseases are now becoming ineffective. The principal causes, the authors report, are overuse and misuse of antibiotics. As millions of unnecessary prescriptions are written by physicians and as millions of pounds of antibiotics are fed to chickens and livestock to promote growth, chance mutations enable some bacteria to survive, creating new generations of antibiotic-resistant strains. In 1997, a promising new antibiotic called Synercid encountered bacterial resistance even before it reached the market because an analogue, virginiamycin, had long been used in agriculture. While Europe has been successful at keeping antibiotics out of animal feed, the US has not, despite the efforts of the CDC and other groups to persuade the FDA to act. Shnayerson and Plotkin tell a dramatic story, bringing to life a full cast of researchers, clinicians, patients, and deadly superbugs. Although microbes are the enemy, the fight seems like a battle of wits, and humans appear to be losing this round. In the continuing search for new strategies, researchers look for peptides in Komodo dragon saliva, among other places, reexamine the long-abandoned use of bacteria-eating viruses, focus on the use of vaccines, and hope that at some future time genomics will provide answers. An annotated list of relevant Web sites provides access to current information on the problem of antibiotic resistance. The present threat of biological terrorism makes this scientific page-turner especially timely. Read the full Kirkus review here.

"An exciting narrative....admirably clear and accurate."

In Medicine Quest, Mark Plotkin moves beyond the Amazon rainforests of his classic Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice to describe the ongoing race to find new medicines for intractable diseases such as AIDS,cancer, diabetes, and tuberculosis in far-flung places all over the world. While highlighting the unlikely marriage of natural products, indigenous wisdom, and biotechnology, Plotkin details discoveries that are producing stunning results in the laboratory: painkillers from the skin of rainforest frogs, anticoagulants from leech saliva, and antitumor agents from snake venom. An entertaining and educational weave of medicine, ecology, ethnobotany, history, exploration, and adventure, Medicine Quest will thrill scientists, naturalists, and armchair explorers, and heighten our appreciation for the inexhaustible therapeutic potential of our natural world.

Plotkin expands here on his earlier work, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, by giving an overview of how plants and animals are being utilized to treat disease. Trained as an ethnobotonist (a scientist who studies how people use local plants), Plotkin has the ability to translate science into engrossing anecdotes that are accessible to the lay reader. And he's got good news: the natural world, he writes, has made and will continue to make enormous contributions to modern medicine. (Penicillin, he reminds us, was derived from a fungus.) He describes, for instance, the work of Dr. William Fenical, who developed a chemical from a soft coral that may prove useful in fighting cancer. Plotkin also provides an eye-opening account of the curative properties to be found in the sea, in insects, in snake venom and in plants. But he also delivers bad news: the promise of this vast natural pharmacopoeia is threatened by unchecked population growth, environmental depredation and the destruction of native cultures of tribal shamans (who, he points out, discovered the use of plants that have led to the development of "everything from codeine for pain to quinine for malaria to podo-phyllotoxin for cancer"). A very interesting investigation into nature's medicine, this book also makes a strong case for conservation. Author tour. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. -Publishers Weekly