[QUOTE]Originally posted by johnfowles:
Well Wes I did try to start an earlier topic on Manaus so to keep things simple I will now post a few musings then go to my topic copy it and paste it here then delete the other topic
My topic had a solitary reply by no less than the "B" who said it was
"Prrrrrrrrrretty neat!"
Here follows my topic:-
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I expect a few of you might be intrigued by Gord's obvious enthusiasm for Manaus judging by the way he pronounces the city's name in the delighfful introduction to "The No Hotel"
I am fortunate to have read a simply splendid book about this place and the story of rubber
which reads very much like a novel. It is:-
The River That God Forgot
by Richard Collier
The Story of the Amazon Rubber Boom
illustrated with photographs
Thanks to the wonder of the fabulous OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program that came with my New HP scanner I can reproduce the blurb from the fly leafs of the book's dustjacket
"A thousand miles up the Amazon, surrounded by dense jungle, is the Brazilian city of Manaus. Today Manaus is a ghost town, but just fifty years ago, when the Brazilian rubber boom was at its height, this was a city more swinging than London, more opulent than Paris, more violent than the Barbary Coast. . . a city complete with museums, electric street-cars, and a two-million dollar opera house. Manaus, capital of the jungle state of Amazonas, was built by rubber, greed and slavery - and the tale of its rise and ruin is one of the most dramatic, little-known episodes of recent history.
This is the story that Richard Collier tells in The River That God Forgot. It begins in the early years of this century at a time when two-thirds of the entire world's rubber supply came from Manaus-and when each ton of latex exported cost seven native lives.
Even then the days of Brazil's rubber barons were numbered. In one of the greatest coups of commercial espionage in history - brillantly described here by Richard Collier-British officials had already succeeded in smuggling the precious rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil- and into Malaya. But before Far Eastern rubber could compete with Brazil's monopoly, the powerful kingdom of the Brazilian rubber millionaires was challenged by a daring young American engineer, Walter Ernest Hardenburg. When he learned of the atrocities committed by the rubber company of Julio Cesar Arana, Brazil's most ruthless rubber millionaire, Hardenburg could scarcely believe the tales of murder, rape, and forced prostitution - until he was taken prisoner by the rubber company and witnessed its savagery. From then on, Hardenburg dedicated his life to breaking the power of Arana's rubber empire, a crusade that reached its explosive climax in London in one of the tensest, most dramatic courtroom battles of all time."
I wonder if Gord has ever heard of this book
and hope that somone at EMP will read this and print it out for him to peruse
amongst the book's copious and interesting photographs is this one of a large hotel the "Not The No Hotel" I hasten to add
The 150-room Grand Hotel Internacional in Manaus was locally described as "the finest in Christendom."
Edited to correct no less than 4 stupid typos and to revise the picture filename after cropping it