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Editorial Reviews
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Flowing across the limestone plateaus and tropical forests of Mexico and Guatemala, the Usamacinta River was the cradle of ancient Mayan civilization, heavily traveled and lined with palaces and huge cities. In the aftermath of the European conquest, the rugged Usamacinta country became a remote afterthought, a place where few travelers dared to venture.
Flowing across the limestone plateaus and tropical forests of Mexico and Guatemala, the Usamacinta River was the cradle of ancient Mayan civilization, heavily traveled and lined with palaces and huge cities. In the aftermath of the European conquest, the rugged Usamacinta country became a remote afterthought, a place where few travelers dared to venture.
Christopher Shaw, an American writer and canoeist, makes a journey down the Maya's "watery path," reporting his sightings from this broad stream of "pale jade shot with turquoise and slightly clouded with silt." Sacred Monkey River (whose title translates the Maya name for the great watercourse) is a spiritually charged quest into once-sacred geography--but a land profaned in recent years by warfare and ethnic division. Traveling by kayak, a craft he explains to locals as a canoe of the winik, or native people, of the far north, Shaw takes us through forbidding territory, delivering glimpses of rainforest country that is in imminent danger of being felled by the region's expanding timber concerns and dammed by governments intent on harnessing hydroelectric--and political--power. Ironically, his snapshots of the unspoiled Usamacinta may turn out to be documents of a disappeared world--unless, he observes, international environmental agencies find ways to join with the Maya to preserve their forest world. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
A naturalist who once edited Adirondack Life magazine, Shaw canoes the rough waters of Guatemala's Usumacinta River in this uneven Mesoamerican travel adventure. Like the river itself, the narrative begins slowly, gradually gathering momentum as the author abandons secondary anthropological research in favor of his own, often profound, impressions. The Usumacinta has always contained a liminal world; Shaw describes the fluid boundary between Guatemala and Mexico as "an unruly no-man's-land inhabited by political refugees, fugitives and foreign adventurers." Shaw's travels took him through Mexico's Chiapas region not long after the Zapatista uprising (a little more modern political history earlier in the narrative would have helped novice readers immensely, especially since Shaw slips back and forth between the main journey and one undertaken in 1989, before the uprising). During his river run, he encounters rebels, wayfarers and, in the book's most exciting sequence, drug smugglers. He also confronts exhilarating danger in the river itself ("the boat leaped forward onto the crown, and the world dropped away"). In describing the remote, rugged landscape, Shaw comes down heavily on the side of ecological conservation, bemoaning the loss of the surrounding rainforest to loggers and chicleros (workers who harvest sap from the chicle trees to make gum). A gifted travel writer, Shaw evokes the Usumacinta's territory with startling clarity, though his chronology is sometimes confusing. Veteran canoers and armchair travelers, as well as fans of ancient Mayan civilization, will find these narrative waters exhilarating, if a bit choppy. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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