Rating: 
Summary: the first ever full-river traverse of the Amazon River
Review: I heard Joe Kane describe his trip on NPR's "Fresh Air" by Terry Gross. Joe Kane was so engaging that I immediately ordered the book.
Joe Kane originally signed up with the expedition to chronicle the trip. The expedition planning can be described as haphazard and due to a shortage of people, Joe Kane ended up on the river.
Joe Kane and Piotr Chmielinski, the famous Polish kayaker known as "El Polacko" in the South American countries, were the only two members of the expedition to paddle the whole river. Jerome Truran and Kate Durrant supported the two after they all finished the severe whitewater.
The story is so intense that I could only read one chapter at a sitting. I wanted to take the time to reflect on the action and the events.
The story is amazing. The whitewater, the expedition members, the Sendero Luminiso revolutionaries, the weather, and the natives are all part of the trip. It is important to remember that Joe Kane had very little river experience and he had no idea that he would be on the river at the start of the trip. You will understand the river experience from an author who was truly awed.
Rating: 
Summary: Epic Adventure Story
Review: In 1985 Joe Kane, a writer from San Franciso, along with about ten other individuals from several other countries set out to travel the entire length of the world's longest river. They started at the trickling headwaters of the Amazon in the Peruvian Andes. Nearly seven months and 4,200 miles later, as the river flows into the Atlantic, the group was down to four. Along the way, the group encountered killer rapids, narcotics smugglers, Shining Path geurillas, raging floods and more. This is a readable, exciting book about an epic adventure not likely to be repeated soon. Unfortunately, Kane's account gives short shrift to the latter part of the journey. Roughly two thirds of the narrative describes the first third of the adventure. What is there, however, takes the reader right there, as though along for the journey--from the raging rapids waiting to drown the inexperienced, timorous river runner, to the steaming jungle, to the bugs and snakes, to the almost monotonous routine day after day after day, to the meager existence of those who live along the river. This book is also an interesting case study in leadership and teamwork (or lack thereof) in an epic adventure.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping, Poignant & Funny
Review: Joe Kane not only seizes a wild and exciting subject, but possesses the rare gift of writing with wit, grace and talent. A similar book about river exploration, SHOOTING THE BOH, doesn't have one fraction of the literary value and writing skill...only an interesting subject. I passed this book on to many, many people.
Rating:
Summary: Honest & dangerous fun
Review: Joe Kane travels the way most of us dream about it. We all want to travel the entire length of the Amazon in a kayak. If we are lucky we will be able to afford a 4 to 5 day trip on a big passanger boat. He perfectly captures the balance of fun and fear that makes some extreme trips so memorable and reminds us why we are attracted to extreme travel in the first place. My only gripe about the book is the speed of the narrative. As Kane's trip carried on, he became more hurried to get to his final destination and less interested in pausing to enjoy the environment around him. And as a writer, one senses that he set out to recount everything, but grew impatient and eventually became interested only in getting to the end of his tale. As a result, the early chapters on Peru are detailed and meandering. We don't even get into Brazil until about two thirds of the way through the book. And the final third of the book, from the Peru-Brazil-Colombia border to the Atlantic, whizzes by without a pause, as if the growing speed of the Amazon's current were forcing Kane's narrative forward at an ever faster pace until he finally reaches Belem. There were logistical reasons why Kane was in a hurry, but I was left wishing he had taken the time to pause and meander a little bit more in the lower Amazon.
Rating:
Summary: Honest & dangerous fun
Review: Joe Kane travels the way most of us dream about it. We all want to travel the entire length of the Amazon in a kayak. If we are lucky we will be able to afford a 4 to 5 day trip on a big passanger boat. He perfectly captures the balance of fun and fear that makes some extreme trips so memorable and reminds us why we are attracted to extreme travel in the first place. My only gripe about the book is the speed of the narrative. As Kane's trip carried on, he became more hurried to get to his final destination and less interested in pausing to enjoy the environment around him. And as a writer, one senses that he set out to recount everything, but grew impatient and eventually became interested only in getting to the end of his tale. As a result, the early chapters on Peru are detailed and meandering. We don't even get into Brazil until about two thirds of the way through the book. And the final third of the book, from the Peru-Brazil-Colombia border to the Atlantic, whizzes by without a pause, as if the growing speed of the Amazon's current were forcing Kane's narrative forward at an ever faster pace until he finally reaches Belem. There were logistical reasons why Kane was in a hurry, but I was left wishing he had taken the time to pause and meander a little bit more in the lower Amazon.
Rating: 
Summary: "The Place know One Knew"
Review: Rather than terrifying and death defying as was described by Mr. Kane in "Running the Amazon" I would call a trip through the Apurimac's Acobamba Abyss a demanding, at times physically arduous, but extremely rewarding journey through one of the most spectacular canyons on the planet. As someone who has led and guided river expeditions throughout the world for the past twenty-five years and has personally run the Apurimac I found the Acobamba Abyss to be a place of immence proportions, tremendous raw power, intense solitude and unrivaled beauty. Because the canyon walls were rarely vertical on both sides at the same time and when they were the rapids were mild, it was possible to line or portage around every major obstacle. The serious nature of this expedition was the canyon's remoteness rather than its rapids. I realize that Mr. Kane had virtually no river experience prior to attempting his journey and that the book was written from this perspective over ten years ago; but with so many of the world's rivers threatened by development lecturers and writers have a moral obligation not to sensationalize a story to the point where future visitors are scared away. Dam builders translate words like "dangerous" and "inhospitable" into "useless" (other than for hydroelectric power) and these concepts then become insidious popaganda tools in their war against rivers. Eliot Porter and David Brower summed it up best when they called the once magnificent but since submerged Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, "The Place Know One Knew". With a major damn currently slated for the Apurimac, the Acobamba Abyss is not far behind.
Rating:
Summary: thrilling
Review: Rugged and engaging journey down the Amazon. For six months they are threatened not only by the elements, but also by rebels who shoot at them, and dissention from within the expedition group itself. Highly recommended for armchair adventurers like myself.
Rating:
Summary: Talk about adventure travel from hell
Review: Somebody had the dubious brainstorm of trying to find the source of the Amazon and follow it from a snowfield in the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic Ocean. Of course when you're going to do something like that, you want a crackerjack team of people along to help out through the wild and dangerous spots, of which there are probably at least 2500 miles full of those two qualities along the 4200 mile journey. Whoever chose the team was smokin' something, because talk about your ill-assorted multinational party of eleven weirdos. Joe Kane, the sole American, came along as the journalist to document the whole affair - and he'd never paddled a whitewater canoe before in his life. His chances of even living thru the trip, let along being one of the four lone survivors (no, the others didn't all die; don't worry; they dropped out or were uninvited) were less than zero. Yet, improbably, he traveled every mile, even paddling thru wide still waters for days with a raging fever, and reached the Atlantic 6 months after beginning this odyssey.
He has an understated way of writing of his spine-tingling adventures that's particularly suited for high adventure, stuff like extremes of weather, kamikaze bugs, killer rapids, armed guerrillas, fights between the various factions of team members, knee-deep mud, native Indians who'd never seen a white man before (were they cannibals?), cocaine dealers, etc.
I read it twice and then even listened to it on book-on-tape, narrated by Kane himself.
Wonderful. Don't miss it. Then go immediately to your bookstore and buy Tracy Johnston's Shooting the Boh for a woman's take on a similar hairbrained adventure.
Rating:
Summary: Having been there, I am not impressed
Review: The Rio Apurimac in Peru forms the head waters of the Amazon. The centerpiece of this book is running the Acobamba gorge and its extension, a place seen by probably less than 2 dozen people.
I ran this gorge in 1995 while rafting from Cunyac Bridge to Villa Virgen. The trip is a real grunt. The section is not raftable, but a great extreme kayak run.
We were never in danger although I doubt anything can prepare you mentally and physically for the place. It's more suitable for dinosaurs than humans.
Joe Kane mentions in the book this was his first raft trip. This was no place to start! I suspect this is the cause of the terror and lack of place that comes through in his book.
I read the book before my trip and it scared the bejessus out of me. However I listened instead to those who made the first decent in 1975, 10 years before Kane's trip.
The book makes an entertaining, dramatic read and I recommend it as a thriller. (Hence the score.) However it does a disservice to the Apurimac and to the paddling community. I understand authors are allowed to take liberties but Kane steps over the boundary, perhaps unwittingly. I also do not understand his suggestion their trip was a first decent, his team members at least knew better.
Check out Demon River Apurimac by J. Calvin Giddings (the first decent) or a chapter in River Gods by Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen (partial run in 1977).
Rating:
Summary: Worth reading, but there¿s got to be more...
Review: This is a story about 10 people who set out to run the Amazon River from the headwaters to the Atlantic Ocean (only 4 of them complete the entire trip). The author does a good job at describing the environment, interactions with the local people, and the adventures they encountered on the trip. The first 177 pages describe the initial 700 miles of the journey; the other 100 pages describe the remaining 3500 miles of the expedition. When I was about 2/3 of the way through the book and learned that they had 3500 miles left to go, I wondered how the author could do justice to this large segment of travel in only 100 pages. I felt shortchanged. I'm not saying that the book had to be 1000 pages long, but I think that more should have been said about the 3500 miles. The most exciting part was the whitewater rafting/kayaking through the Acobamba Abyss. Having rafted and kayaked before, I could really identify with their struggles. The author wrote in such a way that I could easily picture what was happening (there were some very intense moments). Being that a number of the team members had very little or no whitewater experience, I'm surprised that they survived this trip. The author did a good job at describing the interaction among the expedition team members (this really added to the story). However, he was too lenient toward Francois Odendaal. Odendaal did not belong on the river at all and made for a very poor expedition leader. I'm glad I bought the book. In my opinion, the writing style is good but not great. I did learn a lot about the countries and the people that border the river.
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