I normally don't pay much attention to testimonial puffery on the covers of books, but of John Vaillant's The Golden Spruce (2005), one reviewer wrote: "Absolutely spellbinding." I can't improve on that assessment. If you so much as peruse the Prologue, you will finish the book soon thereafter.

Also on the jacket of this book is the subtitle: "A Story of Myth, Madness and Greed." That's overblown. This book actually is a story of theft.

The protagonist of this masterfully knitted work is a 300-year-old, 165-foot tall, infertile, one-in-a-billion, improbably chlorotic, perfectly conformed Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis aurea), K'iid K'iyaas, the famed "ooh-ahh" tree of Haida Gwai (the Misty Isles), better known as the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. Haida Gwai is "the Place of the People"?native Haida, and more precisely, the Tsiij git'anee clan. The golden, nearly luminescent spruce grew in a coniferous jungle near a bank of the Yakoun River on Graham Island, home until 1908 of Dawson's caribou, the only rainforest dwellers of its species and now-extinct victims of a tapped-out sea otter economy and the juggernaut of Eurasian "civilization."

The book's main antagonist is a logger, timber cruiser, surveyor, logging road builder, indefatigable eccentric described by friends as helpful and a "hell of a nice guy," and described by himself as cynical. His name is Grant Hadwin and, for reasons complex and convoluted, he stole the mythology, symbolism and "reassuring constant" of the "perpetual tree," venerated by the Haida, marveled by other locals, and protected by the various timber interests that, over time, held logging rights to its surrounding forest.

But there are other antagonists. Most noteworthy among them are loggers?the fallers, chokermen, whistlepunks, donkey punchers, high riggers, gyppos, bush apes and caulk-booted others of the dangerous trade. At the urging of their employers and with government sanction, these mostly fearless, somewhat fatalistic and rarely circumspect sawyers reduced much of the islands' and interior blanketing of huge and ancient Douglas-fir and spruce to stump-riddled and eroded clearcuts. Another is the logging profession?the "terrestrial whaling" culture and its tradition of unsentimentally pragmatic forest clearing for wood products, convenience and short-term security. Another is capitalism, which has myopically traded off the diversity and "soul" of old-growth forests for alleged cutting efficiency and cost effectiveness. And yet another antagonist is the genetic wiring of the human mind, evolving or devolving conscience across the line of no-return, self-righteous zealotry, paranoia and demonism.

The Golden Spruce is far more than "a work of nonfiction." It is an intricate, 256-page web of history, dendrology, ethnology, forestry, meteorology, conservation, oceanography, environmentalism and aberrant psychology. It is a tragedy of a lost symbol, a lost soul, a lost landscape, of multidimensional theft and of what the Haida called "gagiid."

This is John Vaillant's first book, but he is no amateur scribe. Readers are likely to find a style mindful of the topics and literary skills of Robert Pike, Jared Diamond and Jack Olsen. But there is something else of unique intrigue in the narrative. In its meticulous reconstruction, the author's objectivity seems to flag under the weight of the factors of apostasy that very likely made a thief of Grant Hadwin. Fascinating stuff..."entirely spellbinding."

The Golden Spruce, winner of the Governor-General Literary Award for Nonfiction, is available in paperback for $14.95 from W.W. Norton and Company (www.wwnorton.com).