AMAZON JOURNAL

Geoffrey O'Connor's "Amazon Journal" is so dense with information, so steadfast in its impact, that its myriad and urgent implications deserve the further explication of O'Connor's book of the same name. O'Connor hurls us into Brazil's turbulent history of the past decade. Playing with it is the director's Oscar-nominated 1993 thirty-minute "At the Edge of Conquest," a similarly powerful account of an indigenous leader taking on the Brazilian government.

While O'Connor crams a dizzying number of complex issues and developments in a mere one hour, he makes several indelibly provocative points, most notably, that romanticizing indigenous peoples as "noble savages" does everyone and every issue a disservice and, that what drove some 42,000 men to engage in a gold rush highly destructive of the environment and its people was simply grinding poverty.