The Rivers Amazon

“A vast and primeval world comes vividly to life in this first paperback edition of Alex Shoumatoff’s eight-month odyssey through Amazonia.
Travelling by bus, plane, boat, and on foot, Shoumatoff followed the river and its tributaries to their headwaters high in the Peruvian Andes, discovering a hauntingly beautiful, sometimes deadly, twilight world where soaring trees compete for the sun, a hothouse teeming with exotic plants animals, insects, birds, and fish – many still  unclassified, home to peoples usually hidden from outsiders’ eyes, including headhunters and cannibals; and a great riverine web that spreads over an area nearly as large as the continental United States. Here is travel writing at its best, and a classic portrait of one of our planet’s most threatened co-systems.”