Magdalena
River of Dreams
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A captivating new book from Wade Davis - winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Into the Silence - that brings vividly to life the story of the great Río Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and future.
For Wade Davis, Colombia was the first country that captured his heart and gave him license to be free. Here, he tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of their remarkable land.
Braiding together memoir, history and journalism, Magdalena is at once an absorbing adventure through a spectacular landscape and a kaleidoscopic picture of Colombia as it stands on the verge of a new period of peace.
'Outstanding... Davis tells epic tales of passion, violence and ambition with tremendous narrative verve' Sunday Times, Books of the Year
'A wonderful evocation of a lifetime's travel in Colombia' Spectator, Books of the Year
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davis (One River), an anthropology professor at the University of British Columbia, travels the length of Colombia's Rio Magdalena through wildly varied geographies and a past of horrific massacres, in this ardent travelogue. He visits the river's mountainous source, where ancient native communities thrived before conquistadors exterminated them; surveys villages annihilated by a 1984 volcanic eruption that killed 25,000 people; recalls the thousands killed during drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's 1980s reign of terror in Medell n, and the city's rebirth as an urban-planning showcase; recounts the ordeal of farm towns trapped in the recent civil war between murderous left-wing guerrillas and even more murderous right-wing death squads; and basks in placid fishing communities in the river's delta (site of an attack by another right-wing death squad). Along the way he views the country's lush flora and fauna and heartbreaking environmental damage wrought by humans through the writings of 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the book's presiding spirit, and delivers a romantic profile of revolutionary hero Sim n Bolivar, a liberator turned dictator turned bitter old man. Davis stocks his lively narrative with piquant characters, dramatic historical set pieces, and lyrical nature writing ("The mouth of the Rio Magdalena is the color of the earth"). The result is a rich, fascinating study of how nature and a people shape each other.
