RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksIn Fábio Zuker’s new essay collection, The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest, translated from the Portuguese by Ezra E. Fitz and illustrated by Indigenous artist Gustavo Caboco, people, plants, water, animals, and identities are displaced...Everything is rearranged in the wake of colonialism and extractivist capitalism...Zuker explores a new kind of storytelling, one that reports the truths witnessed and investigated by the people of the Amazon amid horrifying pressures...He honors the poetic myths they’ve newly created, combinations of language, place, symbol, and politics that are sorely needed as they navigate life in their rapidly altering home...Zuker is an excellent witness to transformations...He has created a book that is slim and readable and moves quickly through both the real pain of change and the dreamy immersion in the place and its people and stories...His work does corrode form and structure...The stranding of rural people in urban poverty mirrors the minke whale’s story...These strandings are tragedies that resist what we expect from journalism...These strandings invite myth and poetry, conflation and syncretism, resistance to extraction and solidarity in struggle.
