by John Gimlette
John Gimlette travelled extensively in Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. He obviously devoted a great amount of time to researching the area and learned at least a minimal amount of languages that allowed him to communicate better with the people he met. While a travel book, it's nearly as much one a journalist might have written.
This could be a fantastic addition to the Mater Amabilis™ Geography course in high school for South America, scheduled for Level 6 year 1 (eleventh grade). I say could be because there's quite a lot of violence and depravity in the book, because there was quite a lot of violence and depravity in the land. There's an entire chapter on Jonestown, nearly all of which is disturbing at one level or another. (This chapter is early in the book and one of the hardest to read; you could just skip it and enjoy the rest of the book.) I think First Son, who would be sixteen or seventeen by the time he read this book, would be fine. But if I had a young ninth grader and wanted to jump into South America rather than Asia, I would pass on this book.
That being said, I enjoyed this book immensely. It really brought this part of the world to life for me, revealing its past and present in a way I can't imagine enjoying without traveling there myself.
Mr. Gimlette didn't just research historical records before his trip. He read all the literature he could find. Interspersed in his own travels are snippets of quotes from other authors and his own reflections on them, often with humor and appreciation despite acknowledged deficiencies. On Evelyn Waugh:
All he seemed to want was to suffer, to find some distant and barbarous place, and to go there and hate it. Eventually he chose Guiana -- not that he cared much about it. This was not supposed to be a voyage of enlightenment but a punishment. Even the book he wrote, 92 Days, sounds like a sentence. He arrived that new year, and after hating Georgetown (too big, too dull, too much sugar), he set out to hate the interior.There's a lovely interlude at a Benedictine monastery.
At exactly the moment they promised, their euphonious chanting would lift up out of the trees and carry out across the river. Loosing off canticles into this vast expanse of light and silvery water must have felt like addressing heaven itself. 'The only way I can live with celibacy,' Brother Pascal once told me, 'is by having all this beauty.'Mr. Gimlette describes the forest as he was nearing the end of his journey.
The superlatives necessary to express the density of forest simply don't exist. The roadside was like night-time, packed with spikes and armour. As for the canopy, it looked equally defiant, a thick phalanx of huge brain-like structures, riding at anchor. I'd lost count of the schemes and colonies that had foundered under this magnificent vegetable onslaught.The author has a few other books which I intend to read, including one on Paraguay which might also be useful in the South American course.
In the end, this is a brilliant book of depth and humor about an area still full of mystery as it struggles from a difficult past through a complicated present. Share it only with mature students and pre-read for anyone sensitive.
This post contains my honest opinions. I have received nothing in exchange for it. I borrowed this book from the library. The link to Amazon is an affiliate link.
