The best book I have read in a long time. Richard Collier is, I think, one of the great writers of the 1900's. His telling of the "Amazon Rubber Boom" and the naive young American Walter Ernest Hardenberg’s heroic efforts to save the native Indians along the Putumayo River along the border between Peru and Colombia is rich in detail. Hardenberg risks his life to expose the slavery, beatings, murder, rape committed by men getting wealthy as they exterminate the native Indians in the no-man's land between Peru and Columbia