As the Amazon burns, Fabio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.
In 2007, a seven-ton minke whale was found stranded on the banks of the Tapajos River, hundreds of miles into the Amazon rainforest. For days, environmentalists, journalists, and locals followed the lost whale, hoping to guide her back to the ocean, but ultimately proved unable to save her. Ten years later, journalist Fabio Zuker travels to the state of Para, to the town known as the place where the whale appeared, which developers are now eyeing for mining, timber, and soybean cultivation.
In these essays, Zuker shares intimate stories of life in the rainforest and its surrounding cities during an age of raging wildfires, mass migration, populist politics, and increasing deforestation. As a group of Venezuelan migrants wait at a bus station in Manaus, looking for a place more stable than home, an elder in Alter do Chao becomes the first Indigenous person in Brazil to die from COVID-19 after years of fighting for the rights and recognition of the Borari people.
The subjects Zuker interviews are often torn between ties with their ancestral territories and the push for capitalist gain; The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon captures the friction between their worlds and the resilience of movements for autonomy, self-definition, and respect for the land that nourishes us.
Title: The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest
Author: Zuker, F�bio
ISBN: 9781571311818
Binding:
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: 2022-07-01
Number of Pages: 240
Weight: 0.3081 kg
Praise for The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon
A Book Riot Must-Read Book in Translation for 2022
Zuker combines hard-hitting reportage with stories that veer from hopeful to elegiac, and his takes on his subjects' relationship with the rainforest are spot-on and direct . . . This one deserves wide readership. -Publishers Weekly
Thanks to Zuker's essays, neglected voices from a remote part of the world receive much-needed attention . . . Recommended for anyone seeking to better understand the often overlooked world of Indigenous Amazonians. -Kirkus Reviews
In poignant, lyrical, even fable-like essays written primarily from the perspectives of Indigenous people, Brazilian journalist Zuker chronicles the destruction of the Amazon rainforest . . . Zuker presents an in-depth depiction of massive environmental and social decimation conveying urgently needed information and insights. -Booklist
With Zuker, the language, the thoughtful observation, and the work of witnessing this profound time of alteration never falters. In his prose, in his conclusions, and with his keen eye, he allows us to know him in the areas of his expertise, and in the areas of his displacement and wandering. While he does not over-identify with the people he documents, neither does he set himself apart from the world in which they find themselves. -Eiren Caffall, Los Angeles Review of Books
These are astute and vivid dispatches from a part of the world, and a viewpoint that most Americans know far too little about-and that plays an absolutely critical role in the planet's future. -Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon
This unique view of Brazil's precious, precarious rain forest shimmers with passion and an intimate understanding of 'the friction between two worlds, between two ways of relating to the land.' -Foreword Reviews
In this collection of linked essays, Fabio Zuker gathers together the voices of those long left out of the official conversations around what the Amazon was, is, and ought to be. By listening to ordinary people and recounting their tales, he invites us to eavesdrop on an extraordinary conversation unfolding between this place and those who call it home. -Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
This collection of essays by Fabio Zuker is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the challenges and dangers facing the Amazon region and its Indigenous peoples. Zuker has the infallibly keen eye of a world-class journalist. His prose flows like water from one chapter to the next as he tracks harsh realities, like the death of a river, beside the wonderful astonishment of finding a whale in the most unexpected of places. If you get caught in his net, you won't regret it. -Jorge Ramos, author of Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era
Heartbreaking and necessary, these essays embody the struggles of Indigenous peoples respecting their past and fighting for their present, while exploring the long-reaching and deadly impacts that greed-and the forces of evil that supply greed-have on the world and on people in Brazil in particular. -BrocheAroe Fabian, River Dog Book Co.
In the midst of this crossfire that's ravaging the forest, with a far-right government churning out more fake news every minute and manipulating the truth about the burning Amazon rainforest, it's essential to highlight the ethical concern that permeates the writing of these essays: writing that isn't about something or with something, but is, as the Vietnamese filmmaker and thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha puts it, near to it.
-Le Monde Diplomatique-Brasil
