It seems only appropriate to review the remarkable and engaging book about the fate of the Amazon on Amazon.com. The website's name suggests huge and good, and leaves a lot unsaid. My own perception of the Amazon rain forest has been that it was huge (but under assault and diminishing hour-by-hour) and good (diverse species, carbon absorbing). For me at least, the rest wasn't so much unsaid as barely imagined: green, canopy, impenetrable, rivers with piranhas, brutal roads, fires. What is the Amazon, actually?So, this book tells us its dimensions; its historical role (for much longer than I knew) in imagination and in political and economic calculations; how it came under assault, like the rest of the planet, as we upped our industrial game; and remarkable insight into the present trend. But the dimension I hadn't grasped at all was the lives of people, the cultures, the ways of living in the Amazon. As a city boy, I'm accustomed to local complexity, and this book gave me a view of the complex relationships, conflicts, and ways of living that are the human aspect of life in the forest.The present is complicated too, but the going-going-gone idea that's been a spiritual toothache isn't the whole story. Determined and to some extent successful initiatives have preserved some of the forest as a bio-resource, as a carbon sink, and as the home and land of people and their ways of life. The game is in full play, not winding down to a hollywooded bio-disaster. With the emergence of global trade in carbon credits, there may be new power and money in the movement to keep the Amazon huge and good.