Cocaine Train: Tracing My Bloodline Through Colombia [Lingua Inglese] - Rilegato

Smith, Stephen

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0316647497 ISBN 13: 9780316647496

Casa editrice: Little, Brown, 1999

Riassunto

One of the most violent countries on earth, where the cause of death is regularly 'massacre', drink drivers play chicken and kidnap stories pass for dinner party conversation; nine times more dangerous than the United States, Columbia is no place for the nervous traveller. So it is much against his better judgement that, in the summer of 1998, coinciding with a World Cup and a general election, journalist Stephen Smith finds himself boarding the Cocaine Train out of Cali, home of Columbia's infamous drugs cartel. Its passengers prey to theives, extortionists and a dozen different varieties of paramilitary, the Cocaine Train is one of the last remnants of a once great railway system, and Smith is riding in it in search of a grandfather he barely knew: Fred Leslie Frost, pioneering railwayman, upright citizen and diplomat, with a Columbian mistress and an illegitimate son. And the Columbia Stephen Smith uncovers on his extraordinary journey - surreally beautiful, unfathomably savage, seedily glamourous and mercilessly corroded by the trade in drugs- is as remote from his suburban British origins as it is possible to imagine.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

Stephen Smith has both style and destination, and has written a book that is hard to put down ... this is the sort of book that has you greeting each new page with excitement and anticipation (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

This writer has a good eye for the fleeting and bizarre, and there are some marvellous descriptive passages ... COCAINE TRAIN deserves to share the success of Smith's previous excellent travelogue, FOR THE LAND OF MIRACLES (NEW STATESMAN)

Fascinating ... genuinely brilliant (Jon Snow, OBSERVER)

He is the best sort of reporter: detached, ironic, yet well-versed on the terrain he's exploring ... a compelling portrait of a society on the verge of an ideological breakdown (Douglas Kennedy, INDEPENDENT)

Descrizione del libro:

* A gripping search through Columbia for a missing person

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Little, Brown
• Data di pubblicazione: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0316647497
• ISBN 13: 9780316647496
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 256