by Benedict Allen
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by Benedict Allen
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by Benedict Allen
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by Sir Ranulph Fiennes
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by Benedict Allen
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Product Description
Review
This is the paperback version of a book originally published in 1985. Since then, Benedict Allen has become familiar to viewers of BBC television, presenting several documentaries about his travels in Haiti, Mexico and the Mongolian steppes. This book, however, documents his first major trip, undertaken at the age of 23, through the Amazon rainforest. Despite his training in environmental science, Allen preferred not to make an anthropological or botanical survey of what he found along the banks of the river, but rather to chronicle the experience of being there. Bruce Chatwin was perhaps a spiritual mentor, though Allen clearly had more physical stamina, and a stronger taste for raw excitement, than his aesthetically minded predecessor. The book is at times painful to read, given that 20 years on we know only too well what the future held for the native populations of the forest, their sustaining trees cut by loggers, their land ripped apart by mining prospectors. In compensation, there is a freshness and at times a sensitivity in Allen's writing that brings alive the encounters with tribespeople and those who make it their life's work to exploit the Amazon environment. Allen does not romanticize his subjects. His sense of betrayal, when he suspects that his Indian friends are going to allow some gold miners to cut his throat, is powerfully and openly expressed, although it is this incident that forces him to walk through the jungle alone, and thereby develop the survival skills he has subsequently put to good use. At the end of the book Allen, exhausted, starving, with virtually no possessions and in the grip of fever, reaches a plantation and feels happy to see concrete and cars - a fitting end to a trip undertaken with all the carelessness of youthful hubris, and to a book which engages the reader in a classic Boy's Own adventure. (Kirkus UK)
Product Description
This is Benedict Allen's first book - a tale of triumphs, mishaps, dangers and sheer bloody-minded endurance but, at another level, an exploration of the Amazon's dark themes of allurement and exploitation. At the age of 22, inspired by a youthful aspiration to be an explorer, Allen set out to travel from the mouth of the Orinoco to the mouth of the Amazon. But as he stumbled through the Amazonian jungle, he was soon confronted by the harsh reality of his isolation in the midst of potentially perilous territory. Mercifully, the experience of living in the rainforest among indigenous Indians taught him how to survive - a skill of which he soon found himself to be in considerable and urgent need.
This is the paperback version of a book originally published in 1985. Since then, Benedict Allen has become familiar to viewers of BBC television, presenting several documentaries about his travels in Haiti, Mexico and the Mongolian steppes. This book, however, documents his first major trip, undertaken at the age of 23, through the Amazon rainforest. Despite his training in environmental science, Allen preferred not to make an anthropological or botanical survey of what he found along the banks of the river, but rather to chronicle the experience of being there. Bruce Chatwin was perhaps a spiritual mentor, though Allen clearly had more physical stamina, and a stronger taste for raw excitement, than his aesthetically minded predecessor. The book is at times painful to read, given that 20 years on we know only too well what the future held for the native populations of the forest, their sustaining trees cut by loggers, their land ripped apart by mining prospectors. In compensation, there is a freshness and at times a sensitivity in Allen's writing that brings alive the encounters with tribespeople and those who make it their life's work to exploit the Amazon environment. Allen does not romanticize his subjects. His sense of betrayal, when he suspects that his Indian friends are going to allow some gold miners to cut his throat, is powerfully and openly expressed, although it is this incident that forces him to walk through the jungle alone, and thereby develop the survival skills he has subsequently put to good use. At the end of the book Allen, exhausted, starving, with virtually no possessions and in the grip of fever, reaches a plantation and feels happy to see concrete and cars - a fitting end to a trip undertaken with all the carelessness of youthful hubris, and to a book which engages the reader in a classic Boy's Own adventure. (Kirkus UK)
Product Description
This is Benedict Allen's first book - a tale of triumphs, mishaps, dangers and sheer bloody-minded endurance but, at another level, an exploration of the Amazon's dark themes of allurement and exploitation. At the age of 22, inspired by a youthful aspiration to be an explorer, Allen set out to travel from the mouth of the Orinoco to the mouth of the Amazon. But as he stumbled through the Amazonian jungle, he was soon confronted by the harsh reality of his isolation in the midst of potentially perilous territory. Mercifully, the experience of living in the rainforest among indigenous Indians taught him how to survive - a skill of which he soon found himself to be in considerable and urgent need.
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