On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Mount Everest's North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain's finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a young Oxford scholar of twenty-two with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.
 
In this magisterial work of history and adventure, based on more than a decade of prodigious research in British, Canadian, and European archives, and months in the field in Nepal and Tibet, Wade Davis vividly re-creates British climbers' epic attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. With new access to letters and diaries, Davis recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous terrain and furious weather. Into the Silence sets their remarkable achievements in sweeping historical context: Davis shows how the exploration originated in nineteenth-century imperial ambitions, and he takes us far beyond the Himalayas to the trenches of World War I, where Mallory and his generation found themselves and their world utterly shattered.  In the wake of the war that destroyed all notions of honor and decency, the Everest expeditions, led by these scions of Britain's elite, emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope.
 
Beautifully written and rich with detail, Into the Silence is a classic account of exploration and endurance, and a timeless portrait of an extraordinary generation of adventurers, soldiers, and mountaineers the likes of which we will never see again.

Un resoconto scientifico di una spedizione interdisciplinare durata anni nel cuore dell'Amazzonia, sulle vette del Tibet, tra i ghiacci della Groenlandia, tra le remote tribù degli aborigeni d'Australia; un viaggio tra le più antiche e millenarie culture del pianeta, tra i loro bisogni e le loro esigenze, verificando le soluzioni che ognuna ha elaborato nella sua evoluzione storico-culturale, non dimenticando la comune base genetica del genere umano e tutto ciò che essa implica. Un team di etnologi, antropologi, linguisti, sociologi e psicologi a contatto diretto con queste culture 'altre' ha così portato alla luce il comune cammino che il genere umano ha intrapreso, pur nella diversità, pur nella complessità che caratterizza le molteplici forme di adattamento culturale e genetico all'ambiente circostante. L'umanità deve proseguire in questo cammino (uno solo, condiviso, comune) comprendendo e salvaguardando le diversità come unica fonte di ricchezza.

In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombis -- people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had been officially declared dead and had been buried. Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture. In the course of his investigation, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti -- 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.

The Serpent and the Rainbow combines anthropological investigation with a remarkable personal adventure to illuminate and finally explain a phenomenon that has long fascinated Americans.

Recounts the author's education under Richard Evans Schultes, who studied the drug qualities of plants in the Amazon basin, and his own journey in his teacher's footsteps