Determined to experience the mighty Amazon for himself, Dennison Berwick travelled alone for more than year in a small canoe along major rivers and unnamed tributaries. At night he slung a hammock between trees in the forest, surrounded by all the noises of creatures active in the darkness. He walked for a week to reach the source of the Amazon in the snow-capped Andes in Peru; got lost in the forest; took hallucinogenic ayahuasca and ended his adventure by trying to convince an angry hunting party of Yanomami Indians that he was not a gold-miner attempting to rob them. Praise for "Amazon" ..".not just another travel book. (The author has) a sharp eye, an inquisitive nose and boundless compassion for the river dwellers..." Environment Brazil ..".as much a fascinating and timely record of the people of the rainforest as it is the story of a personal quest. The Traveller. "Berwick's vision...is acute." Country Life

Yanomami men and women tell their own stories of their contact with the outside world, especially the decimation brought by an illegal invasion of goldminers since 1987 and the challenges they now face in contact with Whites. This book is the only one reporting from the Yanomami point of view about the attempts by the Brazilian government and gold miners in late 1980s to destroy them, the upsets in the cosmos caused by extracting gold from the earth, and their valiant resistance and fight for survival in the Amazon rain forest. Extract from the Introduction, "There is nothing inevitable about the destruction of tribal societies. What is happening today to the Yanomami in the Amazon, and to many other peoples worldwide, is the deliberate theft of land and killing of people, as has happened wherever Europeans have landed on foreign shores. Apologists seeking to explain this subjugation as the unhappy consequence of "evolution" or "progress" are only giving themselves excuses; conquest by these forces is our own killing-machine by another name. The statistics for mass deaths of indigenous peoples since 1492 are often quoted but worth repeating. An estimated 3.5 million people lived in tribal societies in the area of South America known today as Brazil; only about 250,000 survive. Dozens of tribes have become extinct and others have been devastated. For example, the Nambiquara along the southern watershed of the Amazon numbered 20,000 people when first visited by Europeans in 1909. By 1970, only 6OO Nambiquara were left alive in a reserve 0.5 per cent of the size of their traditional land. I arrived in the Amazon for the first time in 1986 with all the usual preconceptions of a liberal education; I believed the deaths of tribal societies were tragic but inevitable. The stronger (subconsciously understanding this to mean superior) forces from one society had won over the weaker. It has happened throughout history by force of arms and by force of trade. Tribes, being primitive (of coarse meaning only less developed), fell apart when shaken up by the arrival of Europeans. Armed resistance only emphasized the superiority of our weapons over tomahawks or bows and arrows. Like millions of other fair-minded Europeans, I believed the social progress that came from contact with the Whiteman inevitably meant the destruction of the tribal Indians of South America. Indians in contact with Europeans are drawn irresistibly into the Whiteman's camp - begging for food or tools proves the superiority of our culture for it can supply items the Indians want; in time, they wear our clothes, pray in our churches, buy our radios and abandon their war paint and feathers. Disease can speed up this implosion, but the process of social evolution continues and, inevitably, the Indian disappears. This is what I believed and it is a lie." ..".He has a refreshing lack of pretension. As an added bonus, Savages is beautifully written -- there's a rythmn to Berwick's prose that takes the reader gently through the book." Sue Sutton, Globe & Mail.

An enchanting portrayal of rural and urban northern India along the banks of her holiest river, stretching from the Bay of Bengal up into the Himalayas. The pilgrimage took seven months. Dennison Berwick writes, "I wanted to make a great walk, to set off with no prospect of ending for months. I wanted to see the land that had fired the British imagination for generations. I wanted to travel at the pace of rural India, where four out of five Indians live, and to walk in the footsteps of the peasants. And why the Ganga? I was searching for answers to one question: How could a river also be a goddess? For millions of Hindus, the river Ganga is the physical expression of the goddess Ganga; bathing in her waters is both spiritual ritual and necessary ablution. We have learned so well in the West to separate sacred from secular that the very notion of their being indivisible, like the Ganga, seems absurd. However, the Native Indians of Canada have a saving. 'Never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins, ' and this was something I took literally. I was determined to wear village clothes, eat local foods, adopt local customs for washing and toilet and as much as possible speak the language. I felt that meeting India's people and walking through her villages and beside her most sacred river was the only way to learn about the country. Perhaps then, I thought, I might begin to understand something of the relationship between the Ganga and her devotees and might find answers to my question.