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Wild Coast: Travels On South America's Untamed Edge (2011)

by John Gimlette(Favorite Author)

3.79 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0307272532 (ISBN13: 9780307272539)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: This was EXCELLENT. The best travel book I have read in a long, long time - colorful, engrossing, and written with a sense of quirky glee. Full of adjectives that shouldn't work, yet do, and verbs that are made up ("the wagon wheels gloomping through the mud"), yet perfect. And about a part of the world that I know nothing about, making the ride all the more enjoyable. I am officially ALL OVER the Gimlette oeuvre.
review 2: This is one of the strangest books I've read in a long time. On one hand, it's about a part of the world that I--and most of the rest of the world--know next to nothing about, and after reading it, I have at last started to fill in some of the blanks in that part of my mental map. Yet there were some chapters (especially "The Golden Rupunun... morei") in which Gimlette's descriptions of his travels were nonsensical, and even after rereading passages, I couldn't tell if it was the writing or the sheer strangeness of the world he was describing that threw me. He also seems a bit uncritical in using earlier travelogues as reliable sources, particularly in repeating the idea that the Carib people were cannibals, which I know from a scholarly book I edited is hotly contested and probably untrue. But at least I now have a sense of what happened in Jonestown (Guyana), why Suriname doesn't show up on nighttime satellite maps, and where France once shipped its prisoners and now launches its satellites and spacecraft from (that would be Guyane). less

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