The Thief at the End of the World

March 1, 2008
Featuring a strangeadventurer and a revolution in the production of rubber, Jacksons tale takes readers to the hypnotic heart of the Amazon in the 1870s. There they meet Englishman Henry Wickham (18461928) toiling at the first of a series of obsessive failures as a planter. However, Wickhams name redounds through botanical and industrial history as the man who absconded from Brazil with seeds of Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree. Explaining that those seeds became the genetic root of the British Empires domination of world rubber production in the early twentieth century, Jacksons comparison of that result with its origin in one eccentrics activity in the back-of-beyond yields a fascinating tale. In a finely crafted narrative, Jacksonshows howWickham embarked on his adult life hoping to become an explorer-writer but abandoned his travels in Amazonia for the lure of wild rubber. Domesticatingrubber was on the agenda of Kew Gardens in London, andas Jackson links Wickham to Kew, hishumanizing of the hard-to-like Wickhamresults in a winning storytelling performance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)