Customer Reviews

Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As an American living in the southern Amazon basin, near the Xingu Indian Reserve, I unfortunately can attest to the truth in Mr. O'Conner's writings. He manages to give one a glimpse of what it is like to exist in this lawless, confusing frontier. To capture the flavor of this land of anarchy truly is difficult but the author does a superb job in transforming the vagueness of this bizarre and mystical frontier into words.

Mr. O'Conner, thank you for putting my thoughts into print. The grand Amazon is under serious attack and ,in my region especially, is being leveled at an exponential rate. Someone please do something.

O'Connor's brilliance is that he combines a writing style that simply engages the reader with a the knowledge that he can't and doesn't know all that there is to know about his topic. He brings together several issues and introduces many intriguing characters (Rauni, Kenny Good, Davi, just to name a few). The combination of the political ineptitude of the Indian organizations and the skewed perception of the Religious affiliates in the Amazon create an overwhelming amount of obsticals for objective journalism. O'Connor reports what happens from the viewpoint of a jounalist that knows he is part of the problem. I have come into contact with Venezuelan Yanomama and have seen first hand the impact that contact has made. O'Connor's unbias journalism is a releif from all of the news specials, and talk-show trash that seems to abound with the "Save the Rainforest" campaign. Read this book if you want a true report of what is happening to the last remaining independent people in the world. The truth is that contact with "white" people has braught innumerable destruction to this once self-sufficient society and Geoffrey O'Connor is not affraid to tell that side of the story.

Amazon Journal is Geoffrey O'Connor's account of the movement to save the indigenous people (or Indians) of the Brazilian Amazon. Though I enjoyed the book, I thought that it was overly long and I was happy to come to the end.

The best parts of Amazon Journal read like a great adventure story. O'Connor met all sorts of desperadoes on one of the world's last frontiers. His stories of flights in and out of the Amazon and of the shady gold miners who prospected for gold on Indian land are interesting reading. O'Connor also gives a good account of how the Amazon issue attracted interest from celebrities, such as Sting.

I cannot rate this book any higher than three stars, however. The biggest problem is that, at 360 pages, the book was "more than I wanted to know" about the Amazon. Also, O'Connor makes his living as a filmmaker, not a writer; his narrative has a disjointed quality that makes the book laborious to follow. A final negative is that even though O'Connor goes into exhausting detail about his attempts to film during his visits to Brazil, the book contains not one photo (aside from the cover).

I'm glad that I read Amazon Journal, but I cannot give it a strong recommendation. It's heading to my local used bookstore.

I picked this book up on Granville Island in Vancouver on a clearance/remainders table out of interest. For people who wonder what has happended to the rainforests in Brazil after much international coverage during the late eighties and early nineties would find this of interest. Kind of sad.