What serendipitous timing. The publishing giant Random House has decided to release best-selling nonfiction writer Richard Preston's new book near Earth Day. And Preston's latest work, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, is about tree climbing.

Preston is best known for his previous nonfiction books, The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer. Like his two earlier works of book-length nonfiction, Preston returns to the world of science in Trees.

In this book, Preston begins the piece with a disclaimer for the reader. He writes, "Passages in which I narrate a person's thoughts and feelings and present dialogue have been built from interviews with the subjects and witnesses, and have been fact-checked."

It is important to take note to that disclaimer. Many writers and scholars of literary journalism have been debating for many years now if writers should be able to include the thoughts of subjects in their works. Some say that it is not possible to know a subject's thoughts, so including the thoughts of someone in a book should not be allowed. Others believe that including the thoughts of a person in the book adds to the narrative.

Although most of Trees is about the lives of a few arborists, or tree scientists, Preston randomly interjects himself into the book. There are several passages that are written in what seems to be a very strong third-person narrative when Preston interrupts his own flow by ending a quote by saying, "[someone] said to me."

This book is ostensibly about people who have evolved the study of trees and tree climbing into an art form. Preston does not belong anywhere in the book throughout most of the narrative. Toward the end of the work, Preston replaces most of the main people in the book with himself and his family. The result of Preston's clumsy third/first-person narrative negates the omnipresent voice that he had tried to establish at the very beginning of the work. His narrative goes from being an unquestionable document of what has happened in the lives of the tree scientists to becoming a mess in which the reader will wonder, disclaimer or not, how Preston heard people's thoughts.

With all of this nonsense aside, one can learn a lot about the world's tallest trees and be entertained with the people who study these special gifts of nature while skipping the parts about Preston. No one needs to be a science geek in order to enjoy most of the narrative that describes how some of the world's greatest arborists have come to know one another and developed the study of trees.

Grade: B

-- Reviewed by Steve Hughes