Tony Wheeler's Dark Lands
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Tony Wheeler’s Dark Lands
Greedy lords, dubious heroes, wicked relations and innocents in peril – today’s world sounds like a grim fairytale!
Travelling along the infamous ‘Axis of Evil’ led to Tony Wheeler’s Bad Lands – now he’s going deeper into the world’s darkest corners to explore a rogue’s gallery of troubled nations.
Every country has its problems, but some problems seem so vexed, so intractable, so absurd, you can only shake your head. Tony Wheeler trains his well-travelled eyes on some of these places and attempts to understand how things got so messed up.
Along the way he gets stoned (with the thrown variety) in Palestine, scores a speeding ticket in Zimbabwe, gets arrested for photographing a bar in the Congo, and visits Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad in Pakistan.
Join Tony and find out if there’s a happily-ever-after in these tales from the dark side.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a follow-up to 2010's Bad Lands, Wheeler travels to eight more countries mired in conflict and strife to report on their conditions, history, and cultures. In Colombia, he documents a visit to the Lost City and outlines the extensive failures of the U.S. War on Drugs. Wheeler describes Haiti as Cinderella with "no Prince Charming...no glass slipper, no happily ever after" and documents the crumbling infrastructure following the 2010 earthquake. His take on Israel and Palestine is nuanced and extensive, crammed with descriptions of landmarks and features "argumentative taxi drivers, stone-tossing teenagers, pushy border officials and inept pickpockets." Wheeler astutely remarks of the Democratic Republic of Congo that "any country that puts democratic' in its name is clearly not democratic" and recalls the nation's post-independence troubles, largely at the hands of Mobutu Sese Seko. In Papua New Guinea, Wheeler visits the downed bomber jet of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the man who orchestrated the attack on Pearl Harbor and the abandoned Panguna copper mine which he describes as resembling a "post-apocalypse movie set." He breaks down the myriad economic woes in Nauru as well as those of Zimbabwe. There are plenty of tips and warnings for visitors about things like photography, malaria outbreaks, and lodgings, but it is Wheeler's sensible thoughts on topics like demographics, the consequences of colonialism, and drone strikes that are most useful for the perspective they provide.
