Richard Evans Schultes was an American “plant explorer, scientist, lover of all things Indian and Amazonian” who devoted his life to studying the relationship between Amazonia’s botany and its people. He is known as the “father of ethnobotany” and as the catalyst of the psychedelic generation — he introduced William Burroughs and the beats to mind-altering plants. Schultes graduated from Harvard University and was offered a grant to study arrow poisons in Colombia. But his passion was for hallucinogenic plants and this drew him into the Amazon forest, which is at its most inaccessible in Colombia.

Within a week he had made history, finding the largest number of psychoactive plants ever discovered by science. During the next 12 years, he made extraordinary journeys through a region of virgin rainforest and unmapped rivers, carrying volumes of Virgil and Homer, snakebite serum, his Rolleiflex camera and little else.

Most extraordinary for us, perhaps, is the contact he had with the many unacculturated — and often uncontacted — Indian tribes. These are the people who stare out at us from Schultes’s photographs. We look at them across half a century, but the gulf is made greater by the knowledge of the tragedy that has befallen so many of the Amazonian Indian tribes. This, then, is Schultes’s lost Amazon, its image captured in these beautiful photographs, their significance — and the importance of his work — made clear by this riveting account of one of the great 20th-century explorers.

The Rough Guide to a Better World
by Martin Wroe and Malcolm Doney (Rough Guides: free from Post Offices or www.roughguide-betterworld.com)

Want to help make the world a better place? Want things to improve, but don’t know how? Well, Rough Guides and the Department for International Development have got together to produce a new guide to help us help the world. And before you go thinking that international development doesn’t concern you, remember that 14 of the UK’s 20 favourite long-haul destinations, including Brazil and Thailand, are in developing countries. The flights we take to get there contribute to global warming and our presence there threatens ecosystems, water resources and ancestral traditions. On the other hand, tourism is one of the world’s most powerful industries, generates huge amounts of money and can be a force for good.

Much of this small, pithy book is devoted to pointing out the issues facing developing countries and explaining how they might be helped by the rest of the world. The chapter on ethical tourism highlights organisations with a commitment to sustainability, such as the Association of Independent Tour Operators (www.aito.co.uk). If we all follow the advice, this new Rough Guide looks set to do what it says on the cover — help us create a better world.

To buy The Lost Amazon for the reduced price of £15.16, excluding p&p, call The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585

Times recommends

• The 10 best bits of travel gear
• Soho's classy, cheap new townhouse
• Dresden: Germany's perfect Christmas city