Jen Card, Eureka Books
On June 6, 2023 PublicAffairs Books, an imprint of New York publishing giant Hachette, will publish The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, by Humboldt County author and activist Greg King. King is best known for naming Headwaters Forest, in 1987. King led efforts to protect Headwaters Forest and other ancient redwood groves held by the Pacific Lumber Company and targeted for liquidation by Houston-based Maxxam Corporation.
King’s first presentation of The Ghost Forest will occur in Humboldt County on Saturday, June 10, at 7:00 p.m., at the Arcata Playhouse. All are invited to this free event. Doors open at 6:30. The event is co-sponsored by Eureka Books, which will be on hand to sell signed copies of The Ghost Forest.
Much of The Ghost Forest examines the twenty-year odyssey to protect Pacific Lumber’s ancient redwoods after Maxxam’s 1985 junk-bond takeover and subsequent tripling of the cut of old-growth forests. Yet The Ghost Forest travels well beyond Maxxam to the fraudulent consolidation of redwood land grants during the mid-19th century, which illegally privatized hundreds of thousands of acres of ancient redwood forest in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties. From there The Ghost Forest examines how redwood became an essential component of industrial expansion during the late 19th and early 20th centuries—so much so that in 1917 a select group of Bay Area industrialists would create a phony environmental group dedicated not to saving the redwoods, but to ensuring their exploitation. It was the first and most successful example of a phenomenon that today we call greenwashing.
Already, The Ghost Forest has received several important reviews and endorsements. The publishing industry standards Kirkus and Publishers Weekly each gave The Ghost Forest a starred review. Kirkus called the book “Haunting … [a] wholly engrossing, urgent account of redwood preservation.” Publishers Weekly wrote, “King’s dogged research turns up the closed-door deals and nefarious legal schemes that led to the destruction of 96% of redwood forests, providing a disturbing chronicle of how lumber companies flouted laws and came out on top. The result is a sobering accounting of the forces environmentalists are up against.”
Richard Preston, author of bestsellers The Wild Trees and The Hot Zone, says, “The Ghost Forest is the book I’ve long wished someone would write, and Greg King has done it luminously well.”
Celebrated American novelist Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain and The Trackers, writes, “The farther I traveled into The Ghost Forest the more convinced I became that I was reading an epic.” To read all ten endorsements of The Ghost Forest, and to keep up on future reviews, visit gregkingwriter.com/the-ghost-forest.
At this event masks are strongly encouraged to protect vulnerable community members.
Resources:
- www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/greg-king-1/the-ghost-forest/
- www.publishersweekly.com/9781541768673
- www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/greg-king/the-ghost-forest/9781541768673/?lens=publicaffairs