Paul Rosolie

It is hard enough to believe the stories, but the awful writing makes it worse.

> Even La Torre had been a walk in the park compared to this. Maybe it was the endless swamp, or proximity to lakes. Whatever it was, the teeming hordes of bloodsucking insects, and their ever-present drone, only increased the fear-inducing repulsiveness of the jungle labyrinth that would not release me.

> Together again, we continued what we had started months earlier, engulfed in the mysterious magnetism between us—which the months and thousands of miles between us had failed to break. After we were reunited, our adventures only escalated and took on an almost cinematic grandeur—climbing the orange boulders of Karnataka, exploring the green jungles in Kerala, nights by the Bay of Bengal.

The writing isn't all this bad, but enough is. I'm not sure if the writing got worse through the book, or if my tolerance just fell, but by the end I was getting pretty tired of it. Still, I enjoyed a lot of the stories.… (altro)

Mother of God is about a young man from the suburbs of New Jersey who follows his dream to be a naturalist and conservationist. Steve Irwin was his childhood hero. Most of the book takes place in the Western Amazon, in Peru, where he works at a eco-lodge as a guide. His dream is to work to preserve the forests from development and poachers and to communicate to the world the beauty of life in the Amazon. To this end he wrote this book, helps run an institute in the jungle, and is working on a film.

Rosolie has a lot of adventures and really at times I found him to be romantic in his descriptions, as well as reckless in the way Steve Irwin would jump on the backs of whatever mega-fauna he saw, including anaconda as big around as an oil barrel. But he does impart a sense of the jungle in a way that is accessible and vivid. Rosolie is no Irwin, he is still discovering his voice, but I feel as strongly as he does about preserving the wild places of the world. We will be hearing more from Rosolie in the future, if he lives, I will be following what he does.… (altro)