At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

Author: John Gimlette
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307806529
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 607

Book Description
A wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay–South America's darkly fabled, little-known “island surrounded by land.” Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now, John Gimlette’s eye-opening book–equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide–breaches the boundaries of this isolated land,” and illuminates a little-understood place and its people. It is a wonderfully animated telling of Paraguay's story: of cannibals, Jesuits, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists; of Victorian Australian socialists and talented smugglers; of dictators and their mad mistresses; bloody wars and Utopian settlements; and of lives transplanted from Japan, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, and the United States. The author travels from the insular cities and towns of the east, along ghostly trails through the countryside, to reach the Gran Chaco of the west: the “green hell” covering almost two-thirds of the country, where 4 percent of the population coexists–more or very-much-less peacefully–with a vast array of exotic wildlife that includes jaguars, prehistoric lungfish, and their more recently evolved distant cousins, the great fighting river fish. Gimlette visits with Mennonites and the indigenas, arms dealers and real-estate tycoons, shopkeepers, government bureaucrats and, of course, Nazis. Filled with bizarre incident, fascinating anecdote, and richly evocative detail, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a brilliant description of a country of eccentricity and contradiction, of beguilingly individualistic men and women, and of unexpected and extraordinary beauty. It is a vivid, often riotous, always fascinating, journey.

Wild Coast

Author: John Gimlette
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307596656
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana are among the least-known places in South America: nine hundred miles of muddy coastline giving way to a forest so dense that even today there are virtually no roads through it; a string of rickety coastal towns situated between the mouths of the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers, where living is so difficult that as many Guianese live abroad as in their homelands; an interior of watery, green anarchy where border disputes are often based on ancient Elizabethan maps, where flora and fauna are still being discovered, where thousands of rivers remain mostly impassable. And under the lens of John Gimlette—brilliantly offbeat, irreverent, and canny—these three small countries are among the most wildly intriguing places on earth. On an expedition that will last three months, he takes us deep into a remarkable world of swamp and jungle, from the hideouts of runaway slaves to the vegetation-strangled remnants of penal colonies and forts, from “Little Paris” to a settlement built around a satellite launch pad. He recounts the complicated, often surprisingly bloody, history of the region—including the infamous 1978 cult suicide at Jonestown—and introduces us to its inhabitants: from the world’s largest ants to fluorescent purple frogs to head-crushing jaguars; from indigenous tribes who still live by sorcery to descendants of African slaves, Dutch conquerors, Hmong refugees, Irish adventurers, and Scottish outlaws; from high-tech pirates to hapless pioneers for whom this stunning, strangely beautiful world (“a sort of X-rated Garden of Eden”) has become home by choice or by force. In Wild Coast, John Gimlette guides us through a fabulously entertaining, eye-opening—and sometimes jaw-dropping—journey.

Travels

Author: Michael Crichton
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307816494
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
From the bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a deeply personal memoir full of fascinating adventures as he travels everywhere from the Mayan pyramids to Kilimanjaro. Fueled by a powerful curiosity—and by a need to see, feel, and hear, firsthand and close-up—Michael Crichton's journeys have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling—swimming with mud sharks in Tahiti, tracking wild animals through the jungle of Rwanda. This is a record of those travels—an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting as Michael Crichton's many masterful and widely heralded works of fiction.

Elephant Complex

Author: John Gimlette
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385351283
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
No one sees the world quite like John Gimlette. As The New York Times once noted, “he writes with enormous wit, indignation, and a heightened sense of the absurd.” Writing for both the adventurer and the armchair traveler, he has an eye for unusually telling detail, a sense of wonder, and compelling curiosity for the inside story. This time, he travels to Sri Lanka, a country only now emerging from twenty-six years of civil war. Delving deep into the nation’s story, Gimlette provides us with an astonishing, multifaceted portrait of the island today. His travels reveal the country as never before. Beginning in the exuberant capital, Colombo (“a hint of anarchy everywhere”), he ventures out in all directions: to the dry zones where the island’s 5,800 wild elephants congregate around ancient reservoirs; through cinnamon country with its Portuguese forts; to the “Bible Belt” of Buddhism—the tsunami-ravaged southeast coast; then up into the great green highlands (“the garden in the sky”) and Kandy, the country’s eccentric, aristocratic Shangri-la. Along the way, a wild and often desperate history takes shape, a tale of great colonies (Arab, Portuguese, British, and Dutch) and of the cultural divisions that still divide this society. Before long, we’re in Jaffna and the Vanni, crucibles of the recent conflict. These areas—the hottest, driest, and least hospitable—have been utterly devastated by war and are only now struggling to their feet. But this is also a story of friendship and remarkable encounters. In the course of his journey, Gimlette meets farmers, war heroes, ancient tribesmen, world-class cricketers, terrorists, a former president, old planters, survivors of great massacres—and perhaps some of their perpetrators. That’s to say nothing of the island’s beguiling fauna: elephants, crocodiles, snakes, storks, and the greatest concentration of leopards on Earth. Here is a land of extravagant beauty and profound devastation, of ingenuity and catastrophe, possessed of both a volatile past and an uncertain future—a place capable of being at once heavenly and hellish—all brought to vibrant, fascinating life here on the page.

Panther Soup

Author: John Gimlette
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099502380
Category : Austria
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
France.

Theatre Of Fish

Author: John Gimlette
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446493407
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
John Gimlette's travels through this harsh and awesome landscape, the eastern extreme of the Americas, broadly mirrors that of Dr Eliot Curwen, his great-grandfather, who spent a summer there as a doctor in 1893, and who was witness to some of the most beautiful ice and cruelest poverty in the British Empire. Using Curwen's extraordinarily frank journal, John Gimlette revisits the places his great-grandfather encountered and along the way explores his own links with this brutal land.

The Gardens of Mars

Author: John Gimlette
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1788544714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 532

Book Description
A journey – both historical and contemporary – among the fantastical landscapes, resourceful inhabitants and isolated tribes of the world's fourth-largest island of enduring fascination for its rich biodiversity: Madagascar. 'A beautifully written depiction of the history of this beguiling island' Literary Review 'Courageous, exploratory, humane and with a wry sense of humour' Spectator 'A feat of journalism, observation and determination' Dr Alyson Hitch 'Wonderfully witty and wry' Benedict Allen We think we know Madagascar but it's too big, too eccentric, and too impenetrable to be truly understood. As well as visiting every corner of the island, John Gimlette journeys deep into Madagascar's past. Along the way, he meets politicians, sorcerers, gem prospectors, militiamen, rioters, lepers and the descendants of seventeenth-century pirates. Insightful and wryly humorous, here's an encounter with the people, landscapes, politics and history of one of the most remarkable places on Earth.

Invisible Country

Author: Annamaria Alfieri
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 1250014964
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Book Description
From the author of City of Silver, a beautifully rich and puzzling historical mystery set in Paraguay, 1868 A war against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay has devastated Paraguay. Ninety percent of the males between the ages of eight and eighty have died in the conflict and food is scarce. In the small village of Santa Caterina, Padre Gregorio advises the women of his congregation to abandon the laws of the church and get pregnant by what men are available. As he leaves the pulpit, he discovers the murdered body of Ricardo Yotté, one of the most powerful men in the country, at the bottom of the belfry. There are many suspects: Eliza Lynch, a former Parisian courtesan who is now the consort of the brutal dictator, Francisco Solano López, and who entrusted to Yotté the country's treasury of gold and jewels; López himself, who may have suspected his ally Yotté of carrying on an affair with the beautiful Eliza; Comandante Luis Menenez, local representative of the dictator, who competed with Yotté for López's favor, and a wounded Brazilian soldier who has secretly taken up with one of the village girls. Lynch is desperate to recover the missing gold, and the comandante is desperate to prove his usefulness to López. To avoid having an innocent person dragged off to torture and death, a band of villagers undertake to solve the crime, including Padre Gregorio, the village midwife, her crippled husband returned from combat, their spirited daughter, and a war widow. Each carries secrets they seek to protect from the others, while they pursue their quest for the truth. Lyrical, complex, and meticulously researched, Annamaria Alfieri's Invisible Country is an ingenious cross between Isabel Allende and Agatha Christie.

The Empress of South America

Author: Nigel Cawthorne
Publisher: William Heinemann
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
Born in Ireland in the 1840's, Eliza Lynch left the country as a young girl, fleeing the potato famine with her parents. As a young woman, she became one of Paris most celebrated courtesans, until she was persuaded by the son of the dictator of Paraguay, to leave Paris for South America, where he promised he would make her Empress of the entire continent. Back in Asuncion, they embarked on a programme of extravagant building (the grandiose buildings they commissioned included a replica of the Palais Garnier), acquisition (Eliza's collection of jewellery was legendary), hospitality (Eliza was known to attend balls dressed as Elizabeth I, highly impractical, given the weather) and, finally, war. Paraguay declared war on a coalition that included not only all the other states in S American, but also the USA, France and Britain. By the time their reign was over, Paraguay's population had been devastated. Eliza died in poverty in Paris. Buried in Pere Lachaise, her corpse was dead up by dead of night in 1961, and smuggled back to Paraguay, where General Stroessner planned, despite the condemnation of the Church, to make her the centre of an Evita-style cult. Her body lies there to this

All that is Solid Melts Into Air

Author: Marshall Berman
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860917854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.