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Most of us know something about the Brazilian Amazon. There is a lot to learn about the Peruvian Amazon, a wholly different environment. This book is another of Dick Lutz's natural history travelogues that mix his experiences on tours with abundant information about the natural and human history of the area he's touring.

It's hard to tell if these are pure books about the author's experience or a literary embellishment of the tour company's promotional material and Guidebook for Tour Guides. Readers will learn about the expedition on the tour company's boat-a journal about Our Experiences for the Folks Back Home-and the natural history of this precious rain forest environment. It's a combination of postcards to those who couldn't make the trip and a good high school course or college course in applied biology.

This book contains some pictures, with credits to the author's wife and to the tour company, but no explanations of what the pictures are. One gets the feeling of looking at a hastily-assembled scrapbook. If you're interested in what a tour of the Peruvian Amazon might be like, you'll gain some insights from this work.

In preparation for a trip to the Peru Amazon, I purchased Hidden Amazon. The book has many useful tidbits about the Amazon and the immediate environs, but the writing style is so juvenile as to be off-putting. The shameless touting of one tour company grows old fast and one starts to wonder why one paid full price for a sales promotion. The photos are excellent, but not one has a description.

There must be better books about this area. I recommend you keep looking

This book is really two books in one. The first is a running narrative of two tours you can take of this area of the Amazon from International Expeditions; the other is book of facts about the location. The narrative keeps up a human interest while the facts fill in the gaps.

The technique works very well. For a short book of 155 pages it seems to have 400 pages of facts and new information. If you were not familiar with this area, it would be hard to find a book that reveals as much information per page as this one. This is what I wanted: to learn as much as possible as quick as possible while keeping the information interesting and within a meaningful context.

I would have liked more information on the actual food provided on the tour, more pictures, and captions of what the pictures are (an editing must). A few pictures of the inside of the boat would have been nice, too. The writing is excellent and the marginal quotes add additional reading pleasure and insights. Lutz is a very good writer. This is a fast moving, easy to read, book.