Running the Amazon

Joe Kane

Published by Alfred. Knopf , hardcover with duskjackett , illustrated

Up until the summer of 1985 no man or woman had ever traveled the full length of the 4,200-mile Amazon River—whose source is a snowfield more than 18,000 feet high in Peru's Andes Mountains, and whose destination is the Atlantic Ocean. In late August of that year nine men and a woman embarked on that incredible journey on foot, by raft, by kayak—through some of the planet's last truly unexplored areas. Theirs would be the only expedition ever successfully to negotiate the entire course of the world's largest river. Running the Amazon is the gripping story of that historie voyage, told by Joe Kane, the sole American member of the expedition to go the full distance.

Kane introduces us to each of the explorers (they came from Poland, Britain, Costa Rica, South Africa, and the United States; some were sportsmen, some joined for science's sake, some for the thrill of it). He makes us feel the tensions that arose among them as well as the myriad difficulties and challenges posed by a landscape as treacherous as it is exotically beautiful.

He gives us the feel of the deadly white-water rapids ("I remember, as we hit the chute, the roller-coaster-stomach, sick-sweet sensation of falling through air. I remember white walls of water rising around us... and that the explosions we made when we hit boulders were louder even than the river itself the experience of true danger when camp was inadvertently set up near a cocaine factory... fascinating encounters with Indians who live in tiny, isolated settlements, and who had never before seen strangers... the terrifying reality of being captured by Maoist guerrillas... the ordeal of negotiating long stretches where the river was at its most .................