The Amazing Amazon. By Willard Price. (Heinemann. 18s.) The Amazing
Amazon. By Willard Price. (Heinemann. 18s.) MR. WR.LARD PRICE challenges his readers by the choice of his title, but it is certain that anyone not familiar with the literature of the Amazon must be amazed at the information which is packed into this book. Hardly a page of it does not read like something from Ripley's "Believe it or Not," but the evidence and documents are usually given. Mr. Willard talks of plants that grow a foot a day, of insects which eat a sleeping man's hair so that he wakes up bald, of the paranha, the carnivorous fish of the Amazon and its tributaries, who will attack a man in numbers and leave him a skeleton in five minutes. He has stories to tell about the fabulous town of Manaos, built during the rubber boom at the begin- ning of the century, which make it sound like a Latin-American Babylon, where every- body lived in luxury, while jaguars and boa constrictors could be found in the surround- ing jungle, two miles from the magnificent opera-house, pre-fabricated in England from Italian marble. Mr. Price has travelled extensively in the Amazon region, but this is not a travel book in the usual sense. It is a brightly written study of the region from the point of view of its peoples, flora, fauna and economic wealth. From time to time Mr. Price himself comes to the fore to describe his Robinson Crusoe existence when he was washed up on a floating island in the river, or to describe a trip he made into the jungle to capture its strange animals for a zoo. This is pe.rhaps the best section of the book—exciting, vivid and full of human incident. But the whole book is
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