At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781400078523)

Haven to Nazis, smugglers' paradise, home to some of the earth's oddest wildlife and most baroquely awful dictatorships, Paraguay is a nation waiting for the right chronicler. In John Gimlette, at last it has one. With an adventurer's sang-froid, a historian's erudition, and a sense of irony so keen you could cut a finger on it, Gimlette celebrates the beauty, horror and-yes-charm of South America's obscure and remote "island surrounded by land."

He takes readers from genteel drawing rooms in Asuncion-where ladies still gossip about the nineteenth-century Irish adventuress who became Paraguay's Empress to the "Green Hell" of the Chaco, a vast, inhospitable tract populated by aging Mennonites and discouraged Indians. Replete with eccentrics and scoundrels, ecologically minded cannibals and utopians from every corner of the earth, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a madly entertaining book.

Author: John Gimlette
ISBN-10: 1400078520
ISBN-13: 9781400078523
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Language: English
Published: 01/01/2005
Pages: 400
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 7.48h x 5.40w x 0.81d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 04/10/2005 pg. 36