Christy fictional_traits's Reviews > Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon

This is a story of adventure, pushing boundaries, disregarding gender norms, and setting historical precedents. Within 300 pages, you are taken through a death-defying journey of the little-explored rapids of the Colorado river, you eddy at times over botanical descriptives and ecological backdrops before shoring up to learn more about the history of environmental science and the Grand Canyon National Park.

In 1938 Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter join four other men, across three boats, to journey 600 miles down the Colorado river in the hope of collecting and surveying its plant life. For the women, this trip was to provide an exciting opportunity to further their studies and contribute to the fast-evolving science of botany. The men too, each had their own agendas in making the trip. However, only one man, the expedition leader, had any sort of rafting experience. In fact, by 1938, there had only been about a dozen trips made, since it was first attempted some 70 years prior. That small handful of successful expeditions contained only men. When the rafting party set out, the media ran riot with harbingers of disaster and death and the complete foolhardiness of women being allowed at all, 'Women have their place in the world, but they do not belong in the Canyon of the Colorado'. Unfortunately, this dramatic publicity overshadowed and virtually dismissed the science that initiated the endeavour. It did not, however, preclude the two women from carefully documenting and collecting the plants; work which proved invaluable as future generations sought to redress the balance of the river's ecosystem. 'Before them, men...saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system....'

Melissa Sevigny really brought this story to life with her descriptive and evocative language. A story that could have been bogged down with botanical, Latin names, is given context and life as we ride down the rapids and learn the history of the place. The grandiose achievement of Clover and Jotter being the first white women to have successfully journeyed down the Colorado river is nicely tempered with the value of their resulting scientific contribution. This book pleasantly surprised me and I'd recommend it to not just readers interested in science and botany but to anyone who enjoys women's non-fiction and their stories.

Thank you NetGalley and W W Norton & Company for the opportunity to read and review this book.