When Paul Rosolie, a restless eighteen-year-old hungry for adventure, embarked on a journey to the western Amazon in 2006, he didn't know that it would transform his life. In the Madre de Dios ("Mother of God") region of Peru, where the Amazon River begins, the cloud forests of the Andes converge with the lowland Amazon rain forest to create the most biodiverse wilderness on the planet.
In a true story of adventure and discovery that spans more than nine years, Rosolie takes us into the most inaccessible reaches of the Amazon. Along the way, he encounters massive snakes, isolated tribes, prowling jaguars, giant anteaters, and much more in the Wild West of the natural world. It is a journey into the last great wilderness that ultimately asks the question of our time: How much longer will these places exist? The primordial depths of the Madre de Dios are in grave danger.
Mother of God is the story of an amazing odyssey into the heart of the wildest place on earth. But as Rosolie delves deeper into the heart of the jungle, he finds things he never imagined could exist. And as the legendary explorer Percy Fawcett warned, "The few remaining unknown places of the world exact a price for their secrets."
Paul Rosolie is a naturalist and explorer who has specialized in the western Amazon for nearly a decade. Along with running a conservation project called Tamandua Expeditions that uses tourism to support rain forest conservation, Paul conducts research and expeditions that take him all over the world in search of ways to save wildlife and ecosystems. In 2014 he launched the first-ever study of anacondas in Amazonia with the Discovery Channel special Expedition Amazon. Mother of God is his first book.