In the Heart of the Amazon Forest

This Penguin Great Journeys book Bates' The Naturalist on the River Amazons, 1863.
My pet hate with books of excerpts is when the contain sentences like “as mentioned in an earlier section” or “as I will cover in more detail later” and the referred parts are not in the excerpt. There are a couple of these in here. I don't know why they don't just edit the sentence out, it would not effect the context and remove the frustration.

Anyhow, despite how long this took me to finish (it was a read at work book, and when work gets busy, lunchtimes are cancelled, as it has been for a couple of weeks), is is a short book of 108 pages. It is an interesting book, concentrating mostly on describing of animals and birds (turtles feature heavily, alligators, toucans, bats and ants are the main topics, with some good general descriptions of the habitats and environment too. The book went a long way to dispell misconceptions about animals, where poor conclusions had been earlier reached (by others) or assumptions had been made, or pure misinformation meant that what was commonly ‘known' about certain animals was incorrect. This added interest to the provision of new information.

My reason this only got the three stars, and not more was that the writing style was so measured and consistent. There was no building to a revelation, no changes in pace and no excitement portrayed. It was written very factually, and was interesting, but was ultimately easy to put down. It read as a education rather than an entertainment, and in my opinion it would have been better as both. There was certainly enough happening on his travels to entertain. FWIW it would have been 3.5 stars if we were allowed halves.

Still worth the read, just try not to spread it out across 2 weeks!