Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind 'the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees'. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling's trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called 'fever trees' because they grow in malarial districts. What he writes about are the many species of Cinchona that grow at high altitudes on the inaccessible eastern slopes of the Andes, in Bolivia and Peru and Ecuador and Colombia and Venezuela, whose bark is the source of quinine.

LRB 25 July 2002 | PDF Download