Brazilian Adventure

By Peter Fleming

Book Overview

"Beyond the completion of a 3,000-mile journey, mostly under amusing conditions, through a little-known part of the world, and the discovery of one new tributary to a tributary to a tributary of the Amazon, nothing of importance was achieved."

Nothing indeed. In 1932, Peter Fleming, a literary editor, traded his pen for a pistol and took off as part of the celebrated search for missing English explorer Colonel P.H. Fawcett. With meager supplies, faulty maps, and packs of rival newspapermen on their trail, Fleming and his companions marched, canoed, and hacked through 3,000 miles of wilderness and alligator-ridden rivers in search of the fate of the lost explorer. One of the great adventure stories, Brazilian Adventure is as fresh a story today as it was when originally published in 1933.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081016065X
• ISBN13: 9780810160651
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Marlboro Press
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Good Old Fashion Adventure Still Works

This is contemporary American adventure: buy an SUV, watch game shows based on Lord of the Flies, try the risotto recipe Martha Stewart used on her ascent in the Himilayas. Please! Brazilian Adventure is the real thing for those who don't own their own snowshoes. Sure, the author and his companions set off with pith helmets worthy of Ralph Lauren and more elaborate gear than they'll ever use; true, Fleming is something of a good old boy circa 1932 Oxford style. Skin to be shed. When reality hits, which it does early in the adventure and continues to the bedraggled end, he rises to the occasion. The narrative is suffused with clear-eyed wit, honesty and optimism. I hope there are other Peter Fleming books out there.

Funny Exciting Travel

Imagine a book co-written by Redmond O'Hanlon and Noel Coward: Funny, exciting, literate, a period piece that still works. Flemming, a young corespondant for the London Times, goes on a half-baked expidition to the heart of Brazil with a group of men both over- and underprepared for the adventure. I enjoyed the book immensely, although his light tone occasionally got to me.