Word: amazons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...glamorous job of reporting, observing, analyzing-and thinking-about the news. But at times, perhaps more often than the reporters for most other publications, they have a story that leads to real adventure. Such was the case with this week's color-picture story on the vast, wild Amazon River basin...
Last week, back at his base in Rio, De Carvalho dutifully reported on the former U.S. army colonel who calls the Amazon city of Belém "better than ten New Yorks put together," and on the doctor who said that the town of Manaus "is really a fine place to live-all it takes is some psychological adjustment." As for his own views, Correspondent de Carvalho left the clear impression that he felt both the cities and the jungle around them were interesting places to visit, but he would not care to live there...
Rubber Barons. The biggest development of Amazon riches was the rubber boom, which began when Charles Macintosh started making raincoats in 1823. Vulcanization and later the automobile fed the prosperity; output rose to a peak of 42,286 tons in 1912-at prices that hit $3 a lb. In the jungle, the rubber barons enslaved Indians and immigrants, drove them so hard that 300,000 died; a 230-mile railroad, built to carry rubber from Bolivia, cost 70 lives a mile to build. In Manaus, the rubber tycoons built mansions and watched Pavlova dance in a $10 million opera house...
Kings Must Please. Mademoiselle led a life of rueful anticlimax. In a setting where devious femininity was an accepted tactic, Mademoiselle was a blunt, soldierly Amazon famed for her huge nose. Obviously destined for a European throne, she rejected princes and kings who proposed to her or were proposed for her-Charles II of England, Alfonso VI of Portugal, Philip IV of Spain. With an annual income of nearly $1,000,000, she was the richest princess in Europe; yet the man who raided her fortune the most shamelessly was her own weak-spined father, the Duke of Orleans...
...Lacour outlined his Death in That Garden, he found himself at a writer's disadvantage. The setting was the upper reaches of Amazonia, but Lacour had never been there. So he left his home near Paris and spent three months in Brazil; including ten days on the Amazon-though quite comfortably on a friend's yacht. When his novel was published, one French critic flatly hailed it as "one of the masterworks of his generation." It is not that, but it is still one of the grimmest stories in some time of man's greed, his search...