Wylie, Lesley (2013) Colombia's Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of the Putumayo, Liverpool University Press (Liverpool). ix + 256 pp. £66.32 hbk. Lesley Wylie has produced an expansive and important study of the Putumayo region, with an eye to how geographical history is manifested in literary productions spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Wylie's monograph begins with background on this region. The Putumayo (known as the Içá in Brazil) is one of the three largest rivers in South America. The region – principally located in the tropical departments of Putumayo and Amazonas, in southern Colombia, but extending also into Peru, Ecuador and Brazil – has endured a very difficult social and ecological history in the modern era. The area experienced general neglect from both Bogotá and Lima during the early years of nationhood. By the late nineteenth century, however, commodities began to be extracted from the Putumayo, including gold, quinine and animal pelts. At the same time, the burgeoning global appetite for rubber brought in the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC), whose engagement in the region resulted in the scandalous exploitation and decimation of a number of indigenous groups. Slavery, debt bondage, mutilation, rape and murder were commonplace instruments of social control during the rubber boom. PAC's notoriety received worldwide attention, culminating in the judicially mandated closure of the company in 1913. Later the zone was militarily contested in the Peruvian–Colombian war of 1933. More strife came to the area during the brutal years of La Violencia, a period of Colombian history spanning roughly the years 1948–1958. By the latter part of the twentieth century to the present day, the Putumayo region has seen new forms of extractive disruption: the current commodities are oil and cocaine. The aggressors in the jungle now include multinational corporations, leftist guerrilla groups and the rightist paramilitaries who oppose them. In an attempt to eradicate coca, the environment was poisoned by aerial spraying of herbicides as part of the US-backed Plan Colombia during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. All the while, the Colombian state has been a remarkably weak presence in the Putumayo, reaffirming a local sense of chronic abandonment by the central government in Bogotá. Wylie's study primarily aims at sketching a literary geography of the region, and the author has done a laudable job of marshalling a wide array of texts to examine her subject, including travel accounts, testimonies, letters, journalism, oral histories, songs, photos and pulp fiction, as well as more literary novels. Colombian writers under discussion include former President Rafael Reyes Prieto (1904–1909); José Eustacio Rivera, whose lyrical novel La Vorágine (1924) became a hallmark of Latin American modernismo; and Sandro Meneses Potosí, whose horror novel The Last Warrior De' Aruwa (2006) is especially noteworthy because its author is a native of the region. Wylie also gathers perspectives from beyond Colombia, including that of Roger Casement, who was sent to Putumayo in 1910 by the British government to investigate the alleged abuses by the PAC. Casement's work was popularised in W.E. Hardenburg's account from 1912, The Putumayo, The Devil's Paradise. Other international writers on the Putumayo include the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, German Jewish émigré novelist Vicki Baum and beat chronicler William S. Burroughs. There was another commander whom we called Muela Rica [Sweet Tooth], because he made his victims eat human flesh. He even told us we had to do it so that we wouldn't starve to death. He used to take hold of the fattest part of the body—and he gestured to his forearm and buttocks—and cut them off, throw them in a frying pan filled with oil and, holding a gun to their heads, would make people eat. (Morris, 2007) This is a frightening and very recent example of the perilous relationship between story and history. The indigenous people alluded to in this anecdote were not at all cannibalistic until they were terrorised by outside groups, who are once again colonising and exploiting the people and jungles of the Putumayo.