Skip to content
Account Login Winnipeg Toll-Free: 1-800-561-1833 SK Toll-Free: 1-877-506-7456 Contact & Locations

parsed(2006-01-03) - pubdate: 05/06
turn:
pub date: 1136268000
today: 1711602000, pubdate > today = false

nyp: 0;

The Golden Spruce

A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed

January 3, 2006 | Trade paperback
ISBN: 9780676976465
$23.00
Reader Reward Price: $20.70 info
We will confirm the estimated shipping time with you when we process your order.
Checking Availibility...

Description

Grant Hadwin had worked as a remote scout for timber companies; with his ease in the wild he excelled at his job, much of which was spent in remote stretches of the temperate rain forest, plotting the best routes to extract lumber. But over time Hadwin was pushed into a paradox: the better he was at his job, the more the world he loved was destroyed. It seems he was ultimately unable to bear the contradiction.

On the night of January 20, 1997, with the temperature near zero, Hadwin swam across the Yakoun river with a chainsaw. Another astonishing physical feat followed: alone, in darkness, he tore expertly into the golden spruce – a tree more than two metres in diameter – leaving it so unstable that the first wind would push it over. A few weeks later, having inspired an outpouring of grief and public anger, Hadwin set off in a kayak across the treacherous Hecate Strait to face court charges. He has not been heard from since.

Thrilling and instructive though it may be, The Golden Spruce confronts the reader with troubling questions. John Vaillant asks whether Grant Hadwin destroyed the golden spruce because – as a beautiful “mutant” preserved while the rest of the forest was devastated – it embodied society’s self-contradictory approach to nature, the paradox that harrowed him. Anyone who claims to respect the environment but lives in modern society faces some version of this problem; perhaps Hadwin, living on the cutting edge in every sense, could no longer take refuge in the “moral and cognitive dissonance” today’s world requires. The Golden Spruce forces one to ask: can the damage our civilization exacts on the natural world be justified?

Winner of the 2006 Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize.

Winner of the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

About this Author

JOHN VAILLANT's acclaimed, award-winning non-fiction books, The Golden Spruce and The Tiger, were #1 national bestsellers. His debut novel, The Jaguar's Children, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. He has written for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and The Walrus. He lives in Vancouver.

ISBN: 9780676976465
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 296
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2006-01-03

Reviews

"In rich, painterly prose, [Vaillant] evokes the lush natural world where the golden spruce took root and thrived, the temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest. . . . Vaillant is absolutely spellbinding when conjuring up the world of the golden spruce. His descriptions of the Queen Charlotte Islands, with their misty, murky light and hushed, cathedral-like forests, are haunting, and he does full justice to the noble, towering trees. . . . The chapters on logging, painstakingly researched, make high drama out of the grueling, highly dangerous job of bringing down some of the biggest trees on earth." --The New York Times
 
"A page-turner as dramatic as a novel. . . . The story is as majestic as the golden spruce, and we are fortunate to have a writer of Vaillant' s exceptional skill to tell the tale." --Vancouver Sun
 
"A beautifully rendered account of cultural clash and environmental obsession." --Maclean's

"In a scrupulously researched narrative worthy of comparison to Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Vaillant uses a tragic episode to tell a larger story of the heartbreakingly complex relationship between man and nature." --Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)
 
"Vaillant writes eloquently of West Coast rainforests, quirky characters drawn to a dangerous but lucrative life in logging and Hadwin, who disappears into the BC archipelago, presumed dead. We also learn a great deal about forest ecology and the crime of clear-cutting." --Canadian Geographic
 
"Balanced and gracefully written. . . .Vaillant explores the subtleties of [Hadwin' s] inner conflicts. . . . Vaillant's multi-layered book is a rich investigation of all the factors that went into Hadwin's act of arboreal vandalism." --Edmonton Journal
 
"[A] sense of the rank, dark underbelly of the [Queen Charlotte] islands permeates the book, whose engrossing narrative passes through the often lethal life of the logger, to the bloody battles of the Haida and the ravaging of the forest itself by a detached corporate entity unconcerned with the past or future." --Times Colonist (Victoria)
 
"Compelling. . . . Handily marries reportage with keen historical insight. . . . [Like] Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger, Vaillant deftly peels away the surface story to explore the psychology below. . . . An intense mystery and a sweeping history, The Golden Spruce makes for a terrific read." --National Post

"Fascinating. . . . Both a gripping wilderness thriller and a sharply focused summary of forest politics, Queen Charlotte Islands history, and Pacific Northwest biology. Essential reading." --The Georgia Straight
 
"[A] powerful and vexing man-versus-nature tale set in an extraordinary place . . . This tragic tale goes right to the heart of the conflicts among loggers, native rights activists and environmentalists, and induces us to more deeply consider the consequences of our habits of destruction." --Booklist (starred review)
 
"Writing in a vigorous, evocative style, Vaillant portrays the Pacific Northwest as a region of conflict and violence, from the battles between Europeans and Indians over the 18th-century sea otter trade to the hard-bitten, macho milieu of the logging camps, where grisly death is an occupational hazard. It is also, in his telling, a land of virtually infinite natural resources overmatched by an even greater human rapaciousness. . . . Vaillant paints a haunting portrait of man's vexed relationship with nature." --Publishers Weekly
 
"John Vaillant has written a work that will change how many people think about nature. His story is about one man and one tree, but it is much more than that. Logging is a brutally dangerous profession that owns the dubious distinction of having killed and maimed even more men than commercial fishing. Loggers' work is both heroic and sad, and only a writer of Vaillant's skill could capture both aspects of their dying world in such a powerful way." --Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm

If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.