My rating: 5 of 5 stars
"On a winter night in 1997, a British Columbia timber scout named Grant Hadwin committed an act of shocking violence in the mythic Queen Charlotte Islands. His victim was legendary: a unique 300-year-old Sitka spruce tree, fifty metres tall and covered with luminous golden needles. In a bizarre environmental protest, Hadwin attacked the tree with a chainsaw. Two days later, it fell, horrifying an entire community. Not only was the golden spruce a scientific marvel and a tourist attraction, it was sacred to the Haida people and beloved by local loggers. Shortly after confessing to the crime, Hadwin disappeared under suspicious circumstances and is missing to this day. As John Vaillant deftly braids together the strands of this thrilling mystery, he brings to life the ancient beauty of the coastal wilderness, the historical collision of Europeans and the Haida, and the harrowing world of logging -- the most dangerous land-based job in North America."
~~back flap
That's the bare bones of this book: how and why Grant Hadwin cut down the golden spruce. Of course there's much more to it than that: the story of the Haida and their part in this destruction; the story of the first fur traders to come to the Northwest Coast -- how they quickly decimated the sea otter population, and how that trade turned to lumber from the world's largest forest; the background and environmental beliefs of Hadwin himself, as they matured over the years, and melded with his increasing mental instability; the story of logging in the Pacific Northwest, a story of environmental raping and pillaging on a scale never before accomplished, aided by the development of modern logging tools that enable loggers to complete massive clear cuts in record time, all the while believing there would always be a forest to cut down (in the same way that each of us secretly believes we will never die, despite all evidence to the contrary.)
"Absolutely spellbinding" is almost a facile description of this book. I could hardly put it down. Very well researched, very well written, but the subject and the "plot" are also necessary ingredients for the excellence of this book. A book about quantam physics could have been just as well researched & written as this one, but wouldn't have been nearly as fascinating, in my opinion.
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