Rating: 
Summary: How I came to write this book
Review: This book began, for me, in Bangladesh, while looking for man-eating tigers. Exploring the muddy rivers of Sundarbans, the largest mangrove swamp on earth, I was researching my book Spell of the Tiger, on the aquatic tigers who swim out after fishermen's boats and devour some 300 people a year. I saw no tigers for weeks, for the flooded forest there concealed them. But one day the muddy waters parted for an instant, and revealed, to my astonishment, the curves of three pale pink fins. They were Gangetic dolphins-one of the world's five species of strange, little-known, river-dwelling whales. And although I only saw them for an instant, their image continued to haunt me. Years later, at a marine mammal conference, I met a man who told me why: pink dolphins capture souls, he said. Half a world away from Sundarbans, in the Amazon, he told me, lives a different species of pink dolphin. His photographs intrigued me: the pink Amazon river dolphin looks nothing like the athletic marine dolphins who leap in aquaria and sport in front of boats in the ocean. A large animal weighing perhaps 400 pounds, the pink Amazon river dolphin has a curious bulbous forehead, long tubular snout, and wing-like foreflippers with five fingers inside, like ours. They are the world's most primitive whales. And unlike the Gangetic dolphins I had seen in Bangladesh, these Amazon dolphins are bold and abundant, I learned. But they are equally mysterious. A number of people at the conference were trying to study them, with little success. Few claimed to know the number of dolphins in their study area, or to understand the social structure of groups. They did not even know for sure why these dolphins are pink: some said these Amazon dolphins glow pink with exertion; some said only the biggest and oldest animals are pink, and the others are gray or whitish; and most researchers agreed that even after years of study, it was almost impossible to recognize individuals on sight. To local river people, this confusion is no surprise, my informant told me. The people say these dolphins are shape-shifters. They say they can take on human form, rise from the water, and show up at dances to seduce men and women. They can claim your soul and carry you away to the enchanted city beneath the water, the Encante-a place so beautiful, no one ever wants to leave. In fact, these river dolphins do inhabit an enchanted world: the Amazon. I had always longed to go there, but its scale was overwhelming. Discharging 14 times the flow of the Mississippi, source of half the world's river water, the Amazon's jungle is the size of the face of the full moon, and its diversity staggering. There are fish here who nest in the trees. Fish who sing with electromagnetic signals. Ants who garden, creating a substrate of leaves on which they grow a fungus found nowhere else in nature, their only food. Here live birds with claws on the wings, trees with spines that sting, fierce otters six feet long, spiders the size of your hand, lily pads big as throw rugs. Surely I could never fathom this impossibly huge, strange, rich land without a guide-but now I had found one. Dolphins have guided humans for millennia. Legends older than the Minoans tell us dolphins lead the ancients to the center of the world. Even the Greek Sea God, Posidon, turned to a dolphin to help him find his lost bride. So in the Amazon, what better guide could I choose than the pink dolphin? I knew I had found my next book. I had read that these dolphins were thought to undertake long-distance, seasonal migrations, and on this premise I proposed my journey. With my photographer and friend, Dianne Taylor-Snow, I would follow the dolphins on their migration. This was not, in fact, what happened-but instead I followed them on four expeditions that would take me on journeys I could have never imagined: a voyage back into time, and into a world where the plants talk, the trees walk, and the whales come out of the water and dance with humans on the land.
Rating: 
Summary: A fascinating read
Review: This book takes us on a journey through flooded rivers of the Amazonian rainforest. Along the way, Sy Montgomery makes a poignant plea for waters and trees, fantastic creatures and human inhabitants. She describes the dolphins' world as an enchantment, known by local inhabitants as El Encante, in which - beware! - botos, or pink dolphins, fall in love with humans. They lead the humans to their world, and the humans never come back. The symbolism of this story has great relevance. We need to allow ourselves to be drawn to the animals' world and ways of living, if we are to cease harmful activities that devastate their worlds. Why not change out of enchantment, rather than guilt or fear! Yet, this is no mere idealistic portrait. We see the Amazon as it really is, poisonous-spined and enormous-jawed critters dropping in on the author and her companions at every turn. Despite any problems, out of a larger sense of connectedness with life, they keep going, revealing also the endearing aspects of relationship. I loved the images of her clasping the endangered baby boto to her breast. And imagine the ecstasy of swimming in the exhaled bubbles of many dolphins! Until reading this book, I was unaware of the horrendous treatment of indigenous peoples in modern times, in service of and often slavery of the rubber industry and gold mining. How could anyone conceive of a gold ring as precious, knowing the human misery such processes have caused? Also, we see through her commentary of this very unique part of the world and different culture, other creative possibilities for managing ecosystems. I highly recommend this fascinating read.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful narrative of an Amazon adventure!
Review: This book was a wonderful story of a quest to follow the Amazon's pink river dolphins or botos. The author tells the tale of her adventure while giving a true feel of life along the Amazon; the river, the land, the people, the animals.She also touches on native folklore which is quite interesting. A must read for any dolphin or nature lover. People who are interested in rain forest preservation would also like it.
Rating: 
Summary: Amazonian vacation
Review: This is one of those books to read when you don't have the money and/or time to actually travel the planet. I enjoyed that Sy both had a grasp of biology and is a truly talented author. She also obviously cares about the socioeconomic situation of the peoples who live in the area that her biological studies took her. This book transports you into a magical world in which pink dolphins inhabit rivers in a mystical jungle. Sometimes the truth is better than fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Amazonian vacation
Review: This is one of those books to read when you don't have the money and/or time to actually travel the planet. I enjoyed that Sy both had a grasp of biology and is a truly talented author. She also obviously cares about the socioeconomic situation of the peoples who live in the area that her biological studies took her. This book transports you into a magical world in which pink dolphins inhabit rivers in a mystical jungle. Sometimes the truth is better than fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: This book corks my blowhole
Review: To the author: Let me get this straight: You applied with a flimsy pretext to go observe dolphins, to "find the soul" of the Amazon. (Funny how no one writes about the search for the soul of New Jersey. It's always someplace that increases the aspirant's status as interpreter. The Amazon has been prostituted since its discovery, even BEFORE its discovery --in myth; why you suppose your frothy rehash is anything but the same extractivist, exoticizing discourse the West uses to plunder the source-country Americas, is a mystery.) Where was I? Oh, yes. Then you repeat your tourist guides by rote -The rubber barons sent their laundry to Europe, the Meeting of the Waters, so many football fields destroyed, blah blah blah, we know already. Then, not knowing an iota of Portuguese (or lingua geral, better still), you take on underlings to ferry you around and see to your comfort. So there's garbage in the ports? --Any idea where that comes from?
Then, do you acknowledge your privileged vantage? -in one line, yes, you note that tourists can do harm to the very area they wish to see. Would that that stopped you! Then you take Ayahuasca, the cosmological and neurological Virgil of the indigenes and caboclos, and this is the unreal part, you do it to summon dolphin spirits! Sacred vine as recreational trophy for bourgeois day-trippers. Then, as a capper, you relate a slumber party of your half-researched blatherings --endless second- and third-hand accounts of fables, offering no links, context, etymologies, insights to speak of (for example, at one point you tell us the Iquitos prostitutes used to file their teeth like piranhas', but then you don't SPECULATE or reflect critically at all on why that is. Does it have to do with the degradation of women in Latin America or some of kind of reversal of the dynamics of erotic conquests (a topic apropos of your ladykiller/dolphin)? What is the relationship and affective connection of the animal kingdom in general to the Amazonians? Do THEY care about dolphins? (Why not, if not?) Does that effect their ecology? Should WE care about them, besides for the fact they're pretty? What link are they in the river food chain? What of a discussion --in passing at least-- of the complicated politics of First-World ideas of conservation vs. their making a living? Too many things are given unproblematically or unreflectively in this book. And by the way, speaking English deliberately in front of Amazonian river people is RUDE, not to mention paternalistic.
To the editor: Many books about the Amazon are hyperinflated, breathless, and rhetorical by far. They should be purged of HALF of their adjectives. And virtually ALL their adverbs (e.g. here, "dazzingly" , "unimaginably" and for God's sake, "unfathomably".) Where is your blue pencil on sentences like "[We] wanted the same thing: to save this toweringly cruel and nourishing dawn world from fading to twilight." (p. 245)?
Also, virtually all the Portuguese in the book is wrong, save one or two phrases.
To the bookseller: File this under "d" for "dilletanterie".
To the reader: Go find Candace Slater's Dance of the Dolphin instead, which offers real field research.
To Oprah's Book Club: You gotta get this book!
Rating:
Summary: This book corks my blowhole
Review: To the author: Let me get this straight: You applied with a flimsy pretext to go observe dolphins, to "find the soul" of the Amazon. (Funny how no one writes about the search for the soul of New Jersey. It's always someplace that increases the aspirant's status as interpreter. The Amazon has been prostituted since its discovery, even BEFORE its discovery --in myth; why you suppose your frothy rehash is anything but the same extractivist, exoticizing discourse the West uses to plunder the source-country Americas, is a mystery.) Where was I? Oh, yes. Then you repeat your tourist guides by rote -The rubber barons sent their laundry to Europe, the Meeting of the Waters, so many football fields destroyed, blah blah blah, we know already. Then, not knowing an iota of Portuguese (or lingua geral, better still), you take on underlings to ferry you around and see to your comfort. So there's garbage in the ports? --Any idea where that comes from?
Then, do you acknowledge your privileged vantage? -in one line, yes, you note that tourists can do harm to the very area they wish to see. Would that that stopped you! Then you take Ayahuasca, the cosmological and neurological Virgil of the indigenes and caboclos, and this is the unreal part, you do it to summon dolphin spirits! Sacred vine as recreational trophy for bourgeois day-trippers. Then, as a capper, you relate a slumber party of your half-researched blatherings --endless second- and third-hand accounts of fables, offering no links, context, etymologies, insights to speak of (for example, at one point you tell us the Iquitos prostitutes used to file their teeth like piranhas', but then you don't SPECULATE or reflect critically at all on why that is. Does it have to do with the degradation of women in Latin America or some of kind of reversal of the dynamics of erotic conquests (a topic apropos of your ladykiller/dolphin)? What is the relationship and affective connection of the animal kingdom in general to the Amazonians? Do THEY care about dolphins? (Why not, if not?) Does that effect their ecology? Should WE care about them, besides for the fact they're pretty? What link are they in the river food chain? What of a discussion --in passing at least-- of the complicated politics of First-World ideas of conservation vs. their making a living? Too many things are given unproblematically or unreflectively in this book. And by the way, speaking English deliberately in front of Amazonian river people is RUDE, not to mention paternalistic.
To the editor: Many books about the Amazon are hyperinflated, breathless, and rhetorical by far. They should be purged of HALF of their adjectives. And virtually ALL their adverbs (e.g. here, "dazzingly" , "unimaginably" and for God's sake, "unfathomably".) Where is your blue pencil on sentences like "[We] wanted the same thing: to save this toweringly cruel and nourishing dawn world from fading to twilight." (p. 245)?
Also, virtually all the Portuguese in the book is wrong, save one or two phrases.
To the bookseller: File this under "d" for "dilletanterie".
To the reader: Go find Candace Slater's Dance of the Dolphin instead, which offers real field research.
To Oprah's Book Club: You gotta get this book!
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful narrative of an Amazon adventure!
Review: While this book doesn't provide an in depth zoological study of pink dolphins it does take the reader on a thrilling journey through the Amazon. We learn snippets about local legends, colonial horrors, and the rich stew of life that the river teems with. Tarantula's, dart shooting plants, ancient turtles, and of course the enigmatic river dolphins are woven together into a fascinating read. So, if you want hard facts, look elsewhere, but if you want an armchair adventure-you've come to the right book.
Rating:
Summary: Armchair Adventure
Review: While this book doesn't provide an in depth zoological study of pink dolphins it does take the reader on a thrilling journey through the Amazon. We learn snippets about local legends, colonial horrors, and the rich stew of life that the river teems with. Tarantula's, dart shooting plants, ancient turtles, and of course the enigmatic river dolphins are woven together into a fascinating read. So, if you want hard facts, look elsewhere, but if you want an armchair adventure-you've come to the right book.
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