In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, The United States, and the Nature of a Region, by Seth Garfield. Durham. Duke University Press, 2013. xiii, 343 pp. $94.95 (cloth). $26.95 (paper). In his book, Seth Garfield asks how tensions between groups in the Brazilian Amazon in the World War 11 era to shape landscapes and lifeways in the (p. 1). Among these groups were the governments of Brazil and the United States, migrants, labourers, scientists, journalists, artists, and others. His thesis seems to be that these groups each exploited the Amazon for their own ends, in the process redefining its nature with multilayered meanings as a hinterland, borderland, resource-rich promised homeland, and tropical lowland (p. 2). At war's eve, the Amazon had already long been integrated into global trade patterns, but the need to secure a steady source of rubber suddenly drove up its economic and geopolitical value. As the first chapter demonstrates, in the previous decade, the Getulio Vargas regime (1930-1945) had already begun to redefine the Amazon from a neglected region where rubber production had declined to less than one percent of global output in 1932 to an object of nationalist pride, placing the future of the region in the hands of Brasilia's officials. The Estado Novo (1937-1945), especially, promoted this March to the West by giving away free land, promoting research in new crops, improving transportation, and subsidizing education and public health. Here already were several contests--between industrialists in the south and the Amazon's rubber producers, between the military and landowners, between sanitarians and peasants, between intellectuals and technocrats. Chapter two highlights the other side of this binational redefinition of the Amazon, this time by the United States, which had lost ninety-two percent of its rubber supply when Japan invaded the Malayan peninsula. US officials wished not only to boost rubber production but also keep it from the Axis and stabilize Latin America. They had trouble convincing US corporations to invest in the Amazon, but eventually did centralize the purchase of rubber. Congress appropriated funds for development in the Western Hemisphere, and Washington and Brasilia agreed on fixed prices for rubber and on subsidizing health and labour costs. The US government also built several airports in northeastern Brazil. The agreements spoke of Brazilian success not only in supplying short-term US demand but also in achieving long-term development. Chapters three and four shift from geopolitics to labour history, looking at the workers who toiled on rubber plantations and the experience of migrants to the region. Plantation owners and managers struggled to rationalize production against the scattered and autonomous tappers of the Hevia trees from which the latex flowed. Violence sometimes resulted. Brazilian officials, meanwhile, aimed to bring tens of thousands of workers up north, and their ideology of trabalhismo celebrated those who came as patriotic strong men and shamed those who stayed at home. …