About this item
A tale of obsession so fierce that a man kills the thing he loves most: the only giant golden spruce on earth. When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Northwest, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night's work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell. As vividly as John Krakauer puts readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America's last great forest.
About the Author
John Vaillant is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Outside, and Men's Journal, among others. Of particular interest to Vaillant are stories that explore collisions between human ambition and the natural world. His work in this and other fields has taken him to five continents and five oceans. His first book, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (Norton, 2005) , was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction (Canada) .His second book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Knopf, 2010) was an international bestseller and has been translated into 15 languages. Film rights have been optioned by Plan B, Brad Pitt's production company.In 2014, Vaillant won Yale University's Windham Campbell prize for nonfiction (worldwide English) .His first novel, The Jaguar's Children (HMH, 2015) , is coming out in January.
