Guyana the Lost El Dorado: My fifty years in the Guyanese Wilds

As a diamond prospector, gold-panner, surveyor of the uncharted bush, hunter, and builder of roads, Matthew Young spent over fifty years working in the wild forests and savannahs of his native Guyana. In Guyana: The Lost El Dorado, he writes of the beauties and hazards of that life of outdoor adventure with a vivid intensity that puts the reader along side marauding jaguars, labaria snakes dropping from the trees, flesh stripping piranhas, thirty foot anacondas, and battles up river against life-threatening rapids and the thunderous beauty of waterfalls. This is a story of resourcefulness and wonder, a profound respect for nature and the Amerindians of the interior. Writing a kind of social history of Guyana from colonial times to the 1980s, Young also touches upon his personal involvement in the aftermath of the Jonestown tragedy when 900 followers of American cult leader Jim Jones committed suicide. Here is an engrossing, candid account of one of the last untouched tropical rainforests of the world. Guyana: The Lost El Dorado is an indispensable guidebook for on-site travels and a marvelous travelogue for armchair adventures as well.