Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge

By John Gimlette
"Keen-eyed travel writer Gimlette garnered acclaim for depicting sojourns in Newfoundland (Theatre of Fish, 2005) and Paraguay (At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig, 2008). A similar reception well may greet this observant chronicle of his latest adventure, a tour through Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Blending depictions of their present-day appearances and recursions into the history of these former English, Dutch, and French colonies, Gimlette seasons the account with his signature element of pithy portraiture of his hosts, guides, and inhabitants. Most people in these lands between the deltas of the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers live in the coastal strip, but there ends the generality among the three places. Gimlette sorts through a succession of recent events, languages, and ethnicities in discussions that tend to spring from the region's seventeenth-century origins as sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans, and various slave revolts echo in Gimlette's considerations of, for example, violent strife in 1980s Suriname. Displaying open-minded curiosity, Gimlette's marvelous depiction of the tropics ranges far from the tourist track."( Booklist) Check Our Catalog