In October 1987, two wayward college juniors, Steve Sillett and Michael Taylor, unwittingly began separate forays into the unexplored temperate rainforests of northern California, home to the world's tallest tree, the coastal redwood. The two men wouldn't meet for another seven years, but during this time, Sillett, a botanist studying lichen, learned to climb redwoods and discovered a thriving, pristine ecosystem 300 feet above the ground. Taylor, a grocery clerk with severe acrophobia, launched a quixotic, but ultimately successful, search for the world's tallest tree by bushwhacking through the impenetrable underbrush of California's old-growth forests and pointing his homemade surveying devices at treetops.

In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston traces the converging destinies of Sillett, Taylor, and Sillett's future wife and climbing partner, fellow lichen scholar Marie Antoine. Harrowing adventures and groundbreaking scientific discoveries aside, the personal relationships of these maniacally devoted individuals are at the core of Preston's story: Sillett and Antoine's complicated courtship; Taylor's fraught relationship with his father; the early deaths of Antoine's parents.

Preston — a New Yorker contributor and author of popular science books, including The Hot Zone — has a knack for creating riveting narratives, admittedly crucial in a book about people obsessed with trees. He interjects a deadpan explanation of the laws of physics that govern a human body in freefall into his account of Sillett's first redwood ascent. Later, when a close friend of Sillett's falls out of a tree from 100 feet and survives despite massive injuries, Preston gives a blow-by-blow account.

With Hollywood panache, Preston recounts dialogue as if he had been there himself the first time Sillett and Antoine made love 300 feet above the forest floor. Many times, however, Preston was there, joining Sillett and Antoine as a member of their research team and learning the necessary acrobatic climbing maneuvers that allow him to speak firsthand about navigating the complex — and dangerous — architecture of the redwoods' canopy.

The Wild Trees ends up as more than a chronicle of a major scientific discovery; it's also a preservationist's plea for better stewardship of these extraordinarily fragile and slow-growing forests.

-H.G. Masters