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Product Description For fans of The Lost City of Z, Walking the Amazon, and Turn Right at Machu Picchu comes naturalist and explorer Paul Rosolie’s extraordinary adventure in the uncharted tributaries of the Western Amazon—a tale of discovery that vividly captures the awe, beauty, and isolation of this endangered land and presents an impassioned call to save it. In the Madre de Dios—Mother of God—region of Peru, where the Amazon River begins its massive flow, the Andean Mountain cloud forests fall into lowland Amazon Rainforest, creating the most biodiversity-rich place on the planet. In January 2006, when he was just a restless eighteen-year-old hungry for adventure, Paul Rosolie embarked on a journey to the west Amazon that would transform his life. Venturing alone into some of the most inaccessible reaches of the jungle, he encountered giant snakes, floating forests, isolated tribes untouched by outsiders, prowling jaguars, orphaned baby anteaters, poachers in the black market trade in endangered species, and much more. Yet today, the primordial forests of the Madre de Dios are in danger from developers, oil giants, and gold miners eager to exploit its natural resources. In Mother of God, this explorer and conservationist relives his amazing odyssey exploring the heart of this wildest place on earth. When he began delving deeper in his search for the secret Eden, spending extended periods in isolated solitude, he found things he never imagined could exist. “Alone and miniscule against a titanic landscape I have seen the depths of the Amazon, the guts of the jungle where no men go, Rosolie writes. “But as the legendary explorer Percy Fawcett warned, ‘the few remaining unknown places of the world exact a price for their secrets.’” Illustrated with 16 pages of color photos. From Booklist Enthralled with animals and nature from childhood, Rosolie fixated on the Amazon forest and adventured there as a teenager in 2005. From that and subsequent sojourns, he has synthesized this account of experiencing the environment and wildlife of, specifically, the Madre de Dios region of Peru. Coursed by rivers, carpeted with trees, soaked by rain, it is the stage for Rosolie’s quests to find large predators, such as jaguars, anacondas, and crocodiles. The peril in such searching tensely builds in Rosolie’s accounts of his encounters, which relax as he returns safely to his base of civilization, a combination ecotourism-and-biology-research station. Its operation and orbiting personalities connect to Rosolie’s critical observations about threats to the tropical habitat, such as poachers and loggers, with whom he has wary interactions in the course of his treks. They aren’t the only human hazard. In Rosolie’s culminating tale, he enters reputedly unexplored territory, is spotted by indigenous people, and flees for his life. Writing with intrepid curiosity and a passion for ecological preservation, Rosolie will rally readers of Ed Stafford’s Walking the Amazon (2012). --Gilbert Taylor Review “A sobering account of an ecosystem hanging in the balance. . . . An insightful history of the region. . . . Entertaining and revelatory.” -- The Wichita Eagle “Thanks to fastidious journal-keeping that preserved a wealth of detail and emotion, Rosolie delivers an old-fashioned jungle adventure, one with rare immediacy and depth of feeling for the people and creatures he encounters.” -- The Wall Street Journal “Rosolie writes with intrepid curiosity and a passion for ecological preservation.” -- Booklist “A rousing eco-adventure. . . . This is old-school nature writing, unabashedly romantic and free of alienation. . . . Rosolie’s powers of description are so vivid and engrossing that readers will be swept along in his passion.” -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Rosolie’s solo adventures in the heart of the Amazon jungle, up close and personal with giant anacondas and jaguars, are gripping. And his dedication to preserving one of the earth