I owe thanks to the staff of Yacumama Lodge in Peru for providing comfortable lodging, a fabulous education, and a truly unforgettable Amazon experience.
I also owe many thanks for medical advice to Dr. Harry Kraus Jr., novelist, friend, and surgeon, as well as Dr. Mel Hodde and his wife, Cheryl, who make up the writing team known as “Hannah Alexander.” Any medical mistakes are my responsibility, not theirs.
Bushels of thanks to Susan Richardson for test-driving the manuscript more times than I can remember.
Thanks to Gaynel Wilt for traveling with me to the Amazon jungle and for sharing her memorable photos. Thanks to my husband, Gary, who let me go to the jungle while he stayed behind to manage our home. Thank you, Bill Myers, for saying, “You really ought to go.”
Among my many sources for research (including a weeklong trip to the jungle and too many magazine articles and Web pages to list), I found the following books useful:
John Boorman, The Emerald Forest Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux), 1985.
Stanley Coren, Sleep Thieves: An Eye-Opening Exploration into the Science and Mysteries of Sleep (New York: Free Press), 1996.
Roger Harris and Peter Hutchison, The Amazon (Old Saybrook, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press), 1998.
Margaret D. Lowman, Life in the Treetops: Adventures of a Woman in Field Biology (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), 1999.
Geoffrey O’Connor, Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier (New York: Dutton), 1997.
Richard Rhodes, Deadly Feasts: The Prion Controversy and the Public’s Health (New York: Simon and Schuster), 1997.
Mark Andrew Ritchie, Spirit of the Rainforest: A Yanomamo Shaman’s Story (Chicago: Island Lake Press), 1996.
Richard Evans Schultes and Robert F. Raffauf, The Healing Forest: Medicinal and Toxic Plants of the Northwest Amazonia (Portland, Oreg.: Dioscorides Press), 1990.
Linnea Smith, M.D., La Doctora: The Journal of an American Doctor Practicing Medicine on the Amazon River (Duluth, Minn.: Pfiefer-Hamilton Publishers), 1999.
Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 2000.