Published by Profile Books, 2011, 384 pages.
Review by Rishad Patell

A difficult book to review. On one hand, John Gimlette’s book on the northern coast of South America provides a great deal of insight into the countries of Guyana and Suriname and the French department of French Guiana. Often ignored in travel writing and rarely mentioned in day-to-day conversations, it was interesting to read about the people, places and culture of the region.

A large section of the book (over half) is dedicated to Guyana and its long history of white explorers, slaves from Africa, and their centuries-old exploration of the region, as well as Gimlette’s travels from the coast into the wild interiors of the Amazon. And as the author delves into the history, it’s unfortunate that it is only the country’s colonial past that finds dominance in the book—a history that is not particularly fascinating, especially as most Europeans failed to really discover anything of this country beyond the coastline. The Amerindians are dismissed as cannibals, while the history of the slaves is once again largely ignored. And it seems that Gimlette is rather drawn to the bleaker parts of Guyanese history (slavery, civil war and the 1978 Jonestown massacre) without giving us much about the people of Guyana today.

The sections on Suriname and French Guiana do much the same by delving into the horrifying pasts of both, but make for intriguing reading as we know so little about these places. Again, we learn little about the original inhabitants of the land, but we get a lot of insight into the lives of the current inhabitants—a mix of Dutch, African, Javanese and Indians who seem to live strangely disconnected lives from the rest of the continent and indeed from each other.