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A Agua e o Homem na Varzea do Careiro. Hilgard O'Reily Sternberg. Belem, Brazil: Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, 1998. 248 pp.
First published in 1956, Professor Sternberg's dissertation, presented to the Universidade do Brasil (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, presently), has long been regarded as a classical and pioneering piece of work on the study of the geography of the Amazon floodplain. In this second and revised edition, sponsored by the Emilio Goeldi Museum, Hilgard Sternberg offers to a broader audience his meticulously documented study of Careiro Island and its people as he met them in the early 1950s. The book's first edition was a challenge, an inspiration, and a prolific source of documented information for the studies that followed it. Its second edition is obligatory reading for all those interested in the scientific understanding of the Amazon region.
Divided in three chapters, the book integrates in a masterly way the diverse historical, climatogical, geomorphological, hydrological, archaeological, socioeconomic, and agronomic investigations, surveys, and experiments Sternberg conducted to describe and explain the dynamic patterns of both Careiro's natural landscape and its human occupation, and their interrelationships. For him, "in such an inter-disciplinary approach is...