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May 12, 2022 @ 7:00 pm
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The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: A Virtual Evening with Fábio Zuker & Ezra E. Fitz
Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…
A Virtual Evening with
Fábio Zuker
in conversation with
Ezra E. Fitz
discussing
The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest
(Milkweed Editions, $18)
Thursday, May 12, 7 PM ET | On Crowdcast
REGISTER HERE
About the Book:
As the Amazon burns, Fábio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.
In 2007, a seven-ton minke whale was found stranded on the banks of the Tapaj’s River, hundreds of miles into the Amazon rainforest. For days, environmentalists, journalists, and locals followed the lost whale, hoping to guide her back to the ocean, but ultimately proved unable to save her. Ten years later, journalist F bio Zuker travels to the state of Par , to the town known as “the place where the whale appeared,” which developers are now eyeing for mining, timber, and soybean cultivation.
In these essays, Zuker shares intimate stories of life in the rainforest and its surrounding cities during an age of raging wildfires, mass migration, populist politics, and increasing deforestation. As a group of Venezuelan migrants wait at a bus station in Manaus, looking for a place more stable than home, an elder in Alter do Ch o becomes the first Indigenous person in Brazil to die from COVID-19 after years of fighting for the rights and recognition of the Borari people.
The subjects Zuker interviews are often torn between ties with their ancestral territories and the push for capitalist gain; The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon captures the friction between their worlds and the resilience of movements for autonomy, self-definition, and respect for the land that nourishes us.
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About the Author:
FÁBIO ZUKER is a writer and journalist. He holds a master’s degree from the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences in Paris and is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of São Paulo. He has also been three times a Pulitzer Center grantee. As a journalist he is a frequent contributor to Thomson Reuters Foundation and InfoAmazonia and has written for Amazônia Real, National Geographic, Revista Piauí, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, Agência Pública, and Nexo Jornal, among others. He is also the author of On an Escape Route: Essays on Writing, Fear, and Violence (Hedra Editions, only available in Portuguese). In recent years he has focused his research on stories of the Amazon rainforest, looking to write “nearby” the people whose land is being destroyed and their approaches to resistance.