In 2018, the British journalist Dom Phillips joined a 17-day expedition into the Javari Valley, a vast, nearly inaccessible Indigenous land on the western edge of the Brazilian Amazon, tracking signs of an isolated group increasingly threatened by illegal activity.

It was a grueling journey: 650 miles by boat and foot, crossing treacherous log bridges, dodging snakes and pushing through suffocating forest. The river, when it reappeared, offered both relief and what Phillips later called moments of “exquisite loveliness.”

He was struck by the Indigenous guides’ command of the “forest’s secrets,” but even more so by Bruno Pereira, the expedition leader and a seasoned official at Funai, Brazil’s Indigenous protection agency.

Phillips saw him as a public servant deeply committed to protecting Indigenous peoples (though he was not himself Indigenous), and able to navigate the Javari with unmatched ease. When he returned to the region to work on a book, he set out to document how an Indigenous patrol was protecting the largely ungoverned territory — an effort then led by Pereira.

The two men ran afoul of an illegal fishing gang and were killed in June 2022. But the story did not die with them.

Journalist friends and family have brought Dom Phillips’s work to life with the release of “How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers.” Over three years, they completed the half-finished manuscript thanks to crowdfunding, grants and, finally, a willing publisher.

The Javari expedition first appeared in a 2018 article Phillips wrote for the British newspaper The Guardian, and again in the opening pages of his incomplete book.

The trip had been “a huge moment in Dom’s life,” said Jonathan Watts, who co-authored the foreword and a chapter of the book, calling it “a natural starting point, and also maybe fate.”

In 2022, Watts was among the first to hear that the two men had vanished after venturing across the Itaquaí River, deep within the unspoiled rainforest. But there was a crucial mistake: He believed it was Tom Phillips — another Guardian journalist — who had disappeared.

Watts called the paper, which corrected the confusion, while Tom Phillips quickly published the first in a long series of reports on the case — not before calling his family to reassure them he was safe.

He then joined the searches, tracing the region’s remote rivers, the only way in, as hope faded with each passing day. There, he met the photographer João Laet, Dom Phillips’s longtime collaborator and the eyes behind some of the widely shared images of him.

Laet described covering the searches as deeply traumatic. Everything felt chaotic — slow internet, colleagues falling ill with Covid, the relentless pace of reporting, all while one question haunted him: “Where is my friend?”

He held back tears until the workday ended, then collapsed into sleep, each day blurring into the next with exhaustion and grief. “It felt like a trance,” he said in a recent interview.

The two bodies were found on June 15, 10 days after the murder. One suspect confessed to ambushing and shooting the men during a boat journey and led police to the site where they had been hidden.

They were laid to rest in different Brazilian cities that month. Phillips was 57, Pereira, 41.

The crime drew rare global attention to violence in the Amazon. The police concluded that the murders were retaliation for Pereira’s efforts to protect the region from illegal fishing and mining. In November 2024, they charged the alleged mastermind, who was accused of arming and financing the killers.

For Tom Phillips, seeing a colleague’s press card and notebooks recovered in the jungle made it all painfully real: “It could have been any of us.”

But with the news came a “deep sense of responsibility,” he said. “In some ways, it’s therapeutic,” he added, “to keep doing the work, to have a clear mission — which is to finish this book, and keep reporting the hell out of the Amazon.”

The team behind the manuscript moved quickly to secure Dom Phillips’s files, sharing both the digital backups and his carefully cataloged notebooks among the contributors.

For his chapter, Tom Phillips retraced one of his colleague’s journeys to Yanomami Indigenous land — a region of the Amazon as vast, remote and perilous as the Javari Valley.

“Deciphering hieroglyphics” of the late reporter’s handwriting was one challenge. But only by retracing his steps, speaking with the people he met and cross-checking their accounts did the story slowly take shape. “It was all there, if you knew how to break the code,” Tom Phillips said.

Dom Phillips and Tom Phillips are co-authors on a chapter about the rush for Amazon riches, while also showcasing a cacao project supporting local communities in building sustainable income.

Most chapters follow this similar path — rooted in conflict, but searching for solutions.

When Dom Phillips returned to the Javari Valley in 2022 for his book research, the region had become a hot spot for pressured drug trafficking, land grabs, poaching, unchecked cattle ranching and logging.

His widow, Alessandra Sampaio, said he often spoke of a book not just to explore ways forward but to spark an emotional connection to the rainforest, which he felt intensely.

Before the crime, Sampaio said she knew the Amazon “through Dom’s eyes.” He always sent itineraries for safety, along with voice notes, photos and reflections. “Ale, one day you’ll come with me,” he often told her.

She finally got there in 2023, joining a government delegation to the Javari Valley. It was a symbolic return of state presence under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, though Indigenous leaders there continue to call for structural action against growing illegal activity.

One moment stayed with Sampaio: An Indigenous man embraced her, calling her family — and reminding her that family takes care of each other. That, she said, sealed her commitment.

Like many families scarred by loss, she was drawn into a cause through tragedy. Along with helping bring the book to life, she now leads the Dom Phillips Institute, supporting young Indigenous storytellers.

Her only request to the book team was to keep her husband’s hopeful original title. Only the subtitle was changed, as he had inevitably become a character in the story.

“One thing Dom always told me was, ‘Keep going, Ale’,” she said. “Every time I wonder if I can go on, I hear his voice: ‘Keep going, Ale.’ And I do.”

Barbara Holdridge, who co-founded the first commercially successful spoken-word record label, one that began with the poet Dylan Thomas reciting his story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and that led to today’s multibillion-dollar audiobook industry, died on Monday at home in Baltimore, Md. She was 95.

Her daughter, Eleanor Holdridge, confirmed the death.

Ms. Holdridge, along with her best friend, Marianne Mantell, built the label, Caedmon Records, into a recording industry dynamo by releasing LPs of such notable authors and poets as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway reading their own words.

As the recordings’ popularity grew — sales reached $14 million by 1966 (about $141 million in today’s currency) — Caedmon began recording plays and other works of literature performed by famous actors, including Vanessa Redgrave, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Richard Burton and Basil Rathbone. The label also produced children’s stories like “Babar” and “Winnie the Pooh,” employing Boris Karloff, Carol Channing and other performers to read them.

But it was the Dylan Thomas album, featuring the poet’s resonant delivery, that put the infant company on the road to success. Thomas, an eccentric, hard-drinking Welsh poet, was at the height of his fame when the record was released in 1952, and it went on to sell more than 400,000 copies in the 1950s, an unheard amount for such literary fare. Just over a year later, he died of pneumonia at 39.

“If we had started with some of the wonderful poets we recorded later, such as Katherine Anne Porter, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound and Faulkner, I don’t think anybody would have cared that much,” Ms. Holdridge said in 2014 in an interview with WNYC radio in New York. “Students would have. Literature professors would have. But the spark was the Dylan Thomas recordings, and with the money that came from the sales of those recordings, we were able to go forward and record the authors whom we admired.”

The label aimed to present literature as it originated — in the spoken word, Ms. Holdridge explained. She and Ms. Mantell named the company Caedmon in honor of the seventh-century cowherd considered the earliest known English poet.

Though there had been attempts at spoken-word recordings before Caedmon, the two women, who had scraped together $1,500 to start the venture, foresaw a broad audience for authors reading their own words.

“They were enormously prescient,” Matthew Barton, the recorded sound curator for the Library of Congress, said in an interview last year for this obituary. “If you walked into a record store in 1952 and heard Dylan Thomas reading ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales,’ you would say, ‘I want that,’ and your wallet comes out. It showed how well they understood the potential of the medium in this way.”

The Library of Congress added the album to its National Recording Registry in 2008, noting that “it has been credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States.” By 2023, the audiobook market had achieved almost $7 billion in global sales, reaching an estimated 140 million listeners.

Under Ms. Holdridge and Ms. Mantell, Caedmon earned dozens of Grammy nominations and became the gold standard for spoken-word recordings.

The Caedmon story is made more remarkable by the fact that Ms. Holdridge and Ms. Mantell — Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney at the time — were 22-year-old recent graduates of Hunter College in Manhattan when they began their label. Both had degrees in the humanities, and neither had any business experience. In an era when women were expected to be housewives or schoolteachers, Ms. Holdridge, who worked as an assistant editor at a New York publisher, and Ms. Mantell, who wrote label copy for a record company, were ambitious, determined and bored.

Over lunch one day, they lamented that they were working for bosses “who were much more stupid than we,” Ms. Holdridge recalled in the WNYC interview. She suggested that they go to a reading that Thomas was giving that night at the 92nd Street Y. Ms. Mantell then made a further suggestion: “Let’s record him.” They had already been discussing the idea of recording authors reading their own works.

After the reading, they sent a note to Thomas asking if he would consider participating in a recording project with them. They signed the note “B. Cohen and M. Roney,” so that he wouldn’t know that they were women. His manager intercepted the note and sent them a reply, suggesting that they call Thomas at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was living at the time.

After several unsuccessful attempts to reach him, Ms. Holdridge tried calling at 5 o’clock one morning, on the chance that he might just be stumbling home after a night of hard drinking. He picked up the phone. Yes, he said, he would meet the women to discuss their idea.

To their surprise, he actually showed up at the appointed hour, bringing along his wife, the writer Caitlin Thomas. Over a boisterous lunch, he agreed to do the recording for a $500 advance, plus royalties.

“He even wrote down a number of poems he wanted to record,” Ms. Holdridge recalled. “Getting him to the recording studio, though, was something else.”

After one no-show, Thomas eventually arrived at Steinway Hall, a studio on West 57th Street, and recorded a series of poems, including his masterpiece “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” When they still didn’t have enough material to fill both sides of a 33⅓ LP, the women asked if he had anything else to record, and he remembered a story he had published in Harper’s Bazaar called “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” a nostalgic reminiscence from a young boy’s viewpoint. He recorded it as the B-side of the album, and it was that tale that catapulted the record to best-sellerdom.

The women began contacting other famous writers, both male and female, asking them to come to the studio to record their words. And many did.

Barbara Ann Cohen was born in New York City on July 26, 1929, to Herbert Lawrence Cohen, a textile sales representative, and Bertha (Gold) Cohen, who oversaw the household.

Barbara was an avid reader as a child and studied Greek. She also developed a lifelong love of gardening, starting out by making little gardens of twigs and acorns on her apartment windowsill.

She married Lawrence Holdridge, a hydraulic engineer, in 1959. He died in 1998. In addition to her daughter Eleanor, she is survived by another daughter, Diana Holdridge, and two grandchildren. Ms. Mantell died in 2023 at 93.

Ms. Holdridge and Ms. Mantell sold Caedmon to Raytheon in 1970, and it was later acquired by Harper Collins, where the Caedmon imprint of HarperAudio still exists.

In 2001, Ms. Holdridge was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, which lauded her for creating a broad audience for “diverse, high-quality literature” and demonstrating the significance of spoken-word recordings. “The Caedmon catalog is extraordinary for the dramatic gender equality and cultural inclusiveness it achieved,” the Hall of Fame website states. “It expanded the audience for American women’s writing, and women’s writing in general.”

After selling Caedmon, Ms. Holdridge and her husband bought the 18th-century Stemmer House in Owings Mills, Md., and she created Stemmer House Publishers, which put out children’s books and sourcebooks for designers and artists. There, she leaned into another of her passions, developing a 40-acre garden on the property. She also taught book publishing and writing at Loyola University Maryland.

Explaining her aspirations for Caedmon, Ms. Holdridge told NPR in 2002: “We did not want to do a collection of great voices or important literary voices. We wanted them to read as though they were recreating the moment of inspiration. They did exactly that. They read with a feeling, an inspiration that came through.”

Ash Wu contributed reporting.