I think I would have liked Dom Phillips. In fact, we have a few friends in common. An intrepid, award-winning reporter, he was killed in 2022 in the Amazon while researching a book on the destruction of the vast basin’s ecology and the extermination of its Indigenous peoples. A Brazilian advocate for the Indigenous, Bruno Pereira, was murdered with him, both almost certainly by wildlife poachers who overtook their motor boat and gunned them down. Some of Phillips’ colleagues took up the project that he had been working on and published his account as a book, How to Save the Amazon. The Times Literary Supplement of London, where I’ve been writing since 2011, asked me to review it.
November 10, 2025