Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Jules Verne

South American rancher Joam Garral is wanted in Brazil for a crime he did not commit. The sinister Torres can prove him innocent—but Torres’s price is to marry Joam’s beautiful daughter, already promised to another. Verne’s exotic 1881 adventure takes Joam’s family by raft through danger, treachery, and vivid flora and fauna.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Jul 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411459786

Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne was born in the seaport of Nantes, France, in 1828 and was destined to follow his father into the legal profession. In Paris to train for the bar, he took more readily to literary life, befriending Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo, and living by theatre managing and libretto-writing. His first science-based novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, was issued by the influential publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1862, and made him famous. Verne and Hetzel collaborated to write dozens more such adventures, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1869 and Around the World in 80 Days in 1872. In later life Verne entered local politics at Amiens, where had had a home. He also kept a house in Paris, in the street now named Boulevard Jules Verne, and a beloved yacht, the Saint Michel, named after his son. He died in 1905.

Reviews for Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a fairly detailed and exploratory romp through the Amazon in the typical adventurist fashion that Verne writes in. Although I liked the novel, the section part seemed a bit of a let-down compared to the first and I felt a tiny bit disappointed in it. I do not believe, even though it's good, that this is among the strongest of Verne's works.3 stars.

[glennbell_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The story starts slowly and includes a lot of information about the wildlife and habitat of the Amazon River. The story becomes much more interesting later and ties together the information from the earlier chapters. I became interested in the outcome and solution to the problem of the key figure of the story, Joam Dacosta. I was pleasantly surprised that the book improved.

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the better of the less well known Verne novels. The author still has a tendency to "braindump" all of the information he has assimilated about the Amazon basin and its flora and fauna, and the lives of the local population, and thereby go into excessive and somewhat distracting detail. But from the half way point, the plot took off and became quite a gripping story of an innocent man's fight to clear his name from an unjust condemnation for murder a quarter of a century earlier.

[nules_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was a cool book, although despite Jules Verne being the author, it isn’t a whit science fiction. However, there is a nifty cryptogram (if you listen to the audiobook, they read the whole cryptogram letter by letter and it's rather long—so you might want to skip through that part, unless you have an excellent memory and attention span).The book isn't about the Amazon at all, either (although they are on it throughout a fair portion of the book, and they do encounter some animals here and there). It's more of a murder mystery—but it's a cool book nonetheless. I'm surprised it's not more popular.