Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Someone called my attention to this giant blooper on p. 333: "Adam follows the cut, climbing along sentry conifers—spruce to hemlock to Douglas-fir, yew, red cedar, three kinds of true firs, all of which he sees as pine (italicized). " None of these are pines and the sequence in which Adam would have encountered them with elevation is wrong. And Adam is doing his Ph.D. dissertation on, of all things, trees! It would have been good if the author did his botanical homework. I started reading this book but put it down after a few chapters in which the main characters who plant or otherwise nurture a tree of some sort and who are not very likable commit suicide or otherwise die. Very little relation to the trees in those chapters. I'm glad I put it down before I got to the blooper about Adam. I would have taken Dorothy Parker's famous advice: “This is not a novel to be thrown aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” The paper it is printed on is a waste of a tree.