The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

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.

An international best-seller when first published, this is Wade Davis's portrait of the richness and diversity of the world's indigenous cultures and why they matter to us all.

Davis has travelled the world for more than thirty years, studying the mysteries of sacred plants and celebrating the poetics of culture. His explorations of indigenous life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic, the rain forests of Borneo and the Amazon, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti have taught him that many of these cultures are in danger of losing their way of life -- a loss that affects humans on a global scale.

In Light at the Edge of the World Davis' looks at the "ethnosphere" -- the diversity of ways of thinking and living that traditional cultures have to teach us about our place in the world, and how we affect one another and our surroundings.

In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
 
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction 
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction