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Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile (Modern Library) |  | Author: Sara Wheeler
Publisher: Modern Library
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $1.82
as of 9/8/2010 06:06 MDT details
You Save: $13.18 (88%)
New (29) Used (32) from $1.82
Seller: thrift_books
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 261136
Media: Paperback
Edition: Modern Library paperback ed
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0375753656
Dewey Decimal Number: 918.30466
EAN: 9780375753657
ASIN: 0375753656
Publication Date: March 16, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 Our whole Book Club Hated this Book! February 24, 2010
WVUSHAK (Washington, DC)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
My entire book club hated this book. We all found the literary tone novice and the writing choppy and uninteresting. This is once case where pictures would have added a great deal. TERRIBLE.
 lover of travel lit November 9, 2009
Julianne Clark
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was one of the most delightful travel books ever! Not only do you get a glimpse of the entire country, from north to south, but you get a real social feel for class differences between the oligarchy and the poor. The author has a great sense of humor, which is always a plus.
 Disappointing July 19, 2009
L. Brown (Nashville, Tennessee)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I eagerly snatched up this book, as there aren't that many armchair travel books about Chile. Unfortunately I just got bogged down with this one (twice!) and couldn't finish it, and I'm an avid reader who can slog through most any book. Though I wasn't expecting or even hoping for the liveliest of writing, I found it dull in both presentation and choice of material. Too bad. Two stars for choosing an interesting, beautiful country to write about.
Superficial and disappointing August 22, 2008
A. J. Cornish Bowden (Marseilles, France)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
This is a 2006 reissue of a book written more than ten years earlier, and in her introduction to the reissue the author describes it as a young woman's book, but she is too kind: a rather silly and ignorant book would be more accurate. The central problem is that she doesn't seem to have decided what sort of book she was trying to write. A travel book may fall into one of three genres: a tourist guide, an analysis of the political and social character of the country visited, or an account of the adventures experienced by the author. Sara Wheeler doesn't appear to have had any adventures, so the third of these is a non-starter, but her book fails in both of the other two as well: it has too few descriptions of the places visited and too many accounts of the conversations she had about politics to succeed as a tourist guide; as a social and political analysis it has much too much chit-chat. In any case case her knowledge of Chile is very superficial -- the kind of thing she would have heard from her political exile friends in London before she went, rather than things she saw with her own eyes. One has the impression that her main objective was to confirm the ideas she had before going to Chile, and within Chile she stayed (amongst other places, of course) at the British Embassy and on the estates of very wealthy people, where no doubt, she was able to confirm her prejudices. She tells us, for example, that the Chilean population is riddled with anti-semitism: she could easily have picked up that idea from talking with her wealthy friends, but as a description of the population as a whole it is complete nonsense.
Who could visit Lake Chungura in the far north of Chile without finding anything at all to say about its beauty? Who could pass through the Region de los Lagos in the south, but refrain from stopping because she didn't think it would tell her much about Chile? Sara Wheeler, that's who. She mentions (correctly) that the Region de los Lagos is a favourite place for Chilean people to go on vacation, but it doesn't seem to have occurred to her that seeing where ordinary people go on vacation and what they do there would tell her more about the ordinary life of the country than visiting a military base in the Antarctic.
All in all a very disappointing book, with very little of interest to say.
Journry through Chile July 26, 2008
John N. Lee (La Canada CA USA)
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile (Modern Library)A very intertaining journal of travels through Chile.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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