Amazon Stranger: A Rainforest Chief Battles Big Oil [Paperback]

Mike Tidwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2001

One man obsessed with the Ecuadorian jungle and desperate to save it and its people chronicles the struggle of the Cofan people against Big Oil.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A naturalist's paradise, the Cuyabeno wildlife reserve in eastern Ecuador was set aside for tourists, scientists and indigenous Indians. Then oil reserves were discovered near the Aguarico River. One band of natives, the Cofan, moved deeper into the forest and has been fighting the petrochemical companies under the leadership of an American, Randy Borman. Tidwell (The Ponds of Kalambayi) spent several months with the Cofan observing the degradation of the environment wrought by the oil companies. He tells an engrossing story of a primitive people and their remarkable leader. Born in the jungle to missionary parents, Borman chose to stay; he married a Cofan and has fathered two sons. Tidwell paints a vivid picture of the rain forest and its people, of the battle between conservation and exploitation. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Tidwell (The Ponds of Kalambayi, LJ 8/90) so vividly recounts this story of Ecuador's Cofan people and the American who led them that readers will long remember this tribe. Tidwell spent considerable time with the Cofan, learning about their culture and lifestyles. He describes their continuous struggle, headed by Randy Borman, the son of missionary parents, to protect their Amazon homeland from oil company invasion. Even though the Cofan live in a preserve, oil explorations are a constant threat. Hidden in the jungle are toxic dumps from previous explorations, roads cut for equipment that serve as effective barriers to wildlife, and the ever-present politics of oil. An extremely involving story from all perspectives: anthropological (the tribe and its indigenous culture), political (rich oil reserves and what people do to get them), environmental (the enormous problems of oil exploration in the rain forest), and human (Borman, his family, and other individuals). Urged for all collections.
Nancy J. Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohio
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Lyons Press; 1st edition (October 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585743402
• ISBN-13: 978-1585743407
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,626,072 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars vivid, fascinating, heartbreaking and hopeful, May 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Amazon Stranger: A Rainforest Chief Battles Big Oil (Hardcover)

This book is at once an adventure story, a profile of a fascinating individual, a heartbreaking account of one of the greatest environmental crimes taking place in the world today (the destruction by oil companies of one of the world's richest ecosystems, Ecuador and Colombia containing the greatest biodiversity of the entire Amazon Basin) and a David-and-Goliath story of a tiny Amazonian tribe, the Cofan, battling for survival against multinational corporations. As all of those things, it bears comparison with Joe Kane's "Savages," but the Cofan have already dealt with much more destruction than have the Waorani, and this book spends more time on first-hand descriptions of both the riches of the Ecuadorian rain forest and the consequences of oil exploration. (I would recommend this book not only to activists who are trying to save the Amazon, but also to those who are working to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil exploitation, to explode to smithereens the notion that oil exploitation would not devastate the ecology there.)

The editorial reviews here cover just about everything else I would say about this book, so I won't repeat their comments, just direct the reader to them.

...One factual error this book makes repeatedly that I would like to correct: although they speak the same language as the Indians of the Andean highlands, and although they expanded northward into Cofan territory relatively recently, the Amazonian Quichua are NOT migrants from the highlands and NOT newcomers to the rainforest. They are true Amazonian people, distinct syncretic cultures created from the remnants of various destroyed Amazonian tribes who blended together and adopted their lingua franca (Quichua) as their first language. Though the Amazonian Quichua have been influenced (=weakened) by missionaries for much longer than the Cofan, their roots in the rainforest are every bit as deep.