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RETURN THE PAGE Online book buyers were in an uproar last week when Amazon.com admitted it had been selling publishers prominent placement for their books in sections such as "Destined for Greatness" and "What We're Reading." Amazon denies it ever spotlighted a book without editors' approval, but it will let customers return any book it ever recommended, no matter how beaten up. Amazon will also now disclose to customers which digital displays are paid...
Broadcom 11 2,271,800 Excite 10 798,276 Earthlink 12 691,459 @Home 11 542,998 CNET 6 508,928 Amazon 9 446,998 Spyglass...
...study of plants used by indigenous peoples is called ethnobotany, and Plotkin had been steeped in the subject ever since his college years at Harvard a decade earlier. He had taken a course taught by Richard Evans Schultes, a pioneer ethnobotanist who had spent years in the Amazon rain forest. During the first lecture, Professor Schultes showed a slide of what appeared to be three Indians in grass skirts and bark-cloth masks dancing under the influence of some kind of potion. "The one on the left has a Harvard degree," the professor said, pointing out how far some ethnobotanists...
After graduating in 1979, he headed for the Amazon and began visiting shamans, some of whom let him stay for a while as a student medicine man. He slept in thatched huts, ate delicacies like boiled rat, suffered vampire-bat bites and was nearly electrocuted by a giant eel. And he collected, as fast as he could, hundreds of plants that supplied ingredients for the shamans' medical arsenal...
...Western influences seeped into native villages. Thatch roofs were giving way to tin, while shorts and T shirts were replacing breechcloths and feathers. The shamanistic tradition was fading because missionaries brought in modern medicine's pills--many developed from rain-forest plants in the first place. Most ominously, the Amazon rain forest was dying around the edges, torched and slashed by farmers and loggers. Somewhere in the jungle might be a cure for AIDS or cancer that would be lost forever before it could even be discovered...