(2008) The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird. By Bruce Barcott. (ISBN: 9781400062935)

Book Description: Random House, N.Y., 2008. First Edition Thus, number line on copyright page reads: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2. Light Grey Hard Cover Boards, Black Spine with Gold Text. 313 pages with one map, 5.75" x 9.5" tall, 1" thick. New copy - Never read - Not price clipped. Beautiful gift quality copy of book and dust jacket. COLLECTOR'S COPY.

Book Condition: Brand New.

Dust Jacket Condition: Brand New. NON price-clipped DJ [$26.00 US].

About This Book: “The first time we came here I didn’t know what to expect,” she told me as we paddled upstream. “What we found just blew me away. Jaguars, pumas, river otters, howler monkeys. The place was like a Noah’s Ark for all the endangered species driven out of the rest of Central America. There was so much life! That expedition was when I first saw the macaws.” As a young woman, Sharon Matola lived many lives. She was a mushroom expert, an Air Force survival specialist, and an Iowa housewife. She hopped freight trains for fun and starred as a tiger tamer in a traveling Mexican circus. Finally she found her one true calling: caring for orphaned animals at her own zoo in the Central American country of Belize. Beloved as “the Zoo Lady” in her adopted land, Matola became one of Central America’s greatest wildlife defenders. And when powerful outside forces conspired with the local government to build a dam that would flood the nesting ground of the last scarlet macaws in Belize, Sharon Matola was drawn into the fight of her life. InThe Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, award-winning author Bruce Barcott chronicles Sharon Matola’s inspiring crusade to stop a multinational corporation in its tracks. Ferocious in her passion, she and her confederates–a ragtag army of courageous locals and eccentric expatriates–endure slander and reprisals and take the fight to the courtroom and the boardroom, from local village streets to protests around the world. As the dramatic story unfolds, Barcott addresses the realities of economic survival in Third World countries, explores the tension between environmental conservation and human development, and puts a human face on the battle over globalization. In this marvelous and spirited book, Barcott shows us how one unwavering woman risked her life to save the most beautiful bird in the world.

Synopsis: Describes the desperate efforts of a few determined villagers in Belize, led by Sharon Matola, a one-time circus performer who runs the Belize Zoo, to stop efforts to build a huge dam that would destroy one of Central America's great rivers and the last scarlet macaws in Belize, taking on the corrupt Belize government and big money corporations in the process. 25,000 first printing.

About The Author: Bruce Barcott is an American editor, environmental journalist and author. He is a contributing editor of Outside and has written articles for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Mother Jones, Sports Illustrated, Harper's Magazine, Legal Affairs, Utne Reader and others. He has also written a number of books, including The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier (1997) and The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird (2008). In 2009 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in nonfiction.

Barcott was born in Everett, Washington, and raised in Alaska, California and Washington State. After graduating from the University of Washington, he worked for Seattle Weekly for ten years as a writer and editor. He lives in Bainbridge Island, Washington, with his wife and fellow writer Claire Dederer; they have two children.

He was a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2004 his cover story about the Bush Administration’s changes to the Clean Air Act for The New York Times Magazine was judged the year’s best piece of explanatory reporting by the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Bibliography:

• Northwest Passages: A Literary Anthology of the Pacific Northwest from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attractions (1994), Sasquatch Books, ISBN 978-1570610059
• The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier (1997), Random House, ISBN 978-1400062935
• The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird (2008), Random House, ISBN 978-1-4000-6293-5