This is not a book about Colombia and the cocaine cartels!
This was Excellent book detailing the beginning of the New Colombia. This book is over 6 years old, but it did an excellent job explaining who/what FARC is, not to mention the half a dozen other insurgent/ paramilitaries/ terrorist organizations, the diminished but still powerful cocaine cartels, the land owners and their private armies, not to mention a good history of the ever inept and corrupt succession of presidents keeping the wealth concentrated in the hands of the same less than one percent of the population.
It is a country that could be so great. It has so much going for it, between oil, gold, emeralds, amazingly productive soil for farming and a population by and large dying- sadly, literally- just trying to get ahead.
The number of people in the last 30 years who were "disappeared" a term all too familiar to Colombians is staggering. Far, far more than in Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Argentina or really anywhere else in the world.
This is a country where kidnappings were nearly a national pastime. This book also points out the Cocaine is NOT what made Colombia so violent, corrupt, and off limits to outsiders. It was just the newest and most publicized train wreck affecting the country.
Best of all this book will make most people want to visit this beautiful country. ( )

Misleading title. It's not about current Colombia nor does it involve short walks from Bogotá.

Northern Bogotanos would never venture into Barrios Unidos?!

Anyways, it's a well written book informative in many important ways but the title is wrong. This is not a book looking at the new Colombia. It's the same old fascination with the old Colombia which is what fills the news stands and TV shows to this very day.

So far only one story of Colombia has been told, over and over and over again. But as he quoted in the book, "Such is our love of the macabre details of ‘real-life crime’ that, according to the Swedish criminologist Nils Christie, depictions of organized crime in films, books and video games are currently worth more than organized crime itself."
If that's what fascinates you then but all means but it's far, far from the true story of Colombia. ( )

This book is not sure what it wants to be. It's not quite interesting enough to be a travel memoir, but also not well-researched enough to be a social or political history. It's competently written, but didn't scratch my itch for either.

He could also have made himself sound a bit more charming. He admits to having contempt for his fellow tourists, and there's a lot of weird bickering and tension in this. ( )

Columbia. Just the very name brings up images of drug cartels, paramilitary gangs, and a country on the brink of chaos. And in the past this was true, thousands have been massacred, or killed in fighting between rival gangs and the state, or have just disappeared; either by the state or they happened to be in the way of powerful peoples interests.

But Columbia is starting to change. As it stumbles from terrorism to democracy and slowly opens it arms to foreign visitors, Feiling returns to this scarred country. based in Bogota, he ventures to places that have not been accessible until recently. He meets the last nomadic tribe, former guerrilla fighters, and some of the new crop of millionaires who are riding high as the economy grows at an unprecedented rate. Travelling through the lush landscape and thick jungles, he contemplates the new state of the nation, from the unrelenting poverty gaps between the elite and the populace, the historical context of how this country got to where it is now and the fragile future that it faces.

It is a fascinating book, densely packed with facts and background detail, it never looses sight of the struggle that the people still face, with the spectre of the past looking over them. Even though this can be a brutal place to live, they still manage to be happy in the face of all this. They have a long way to go to reach stability, but they have taken those first important steps. ( )

This is not a book about Colombia and the cocaine cartels!
This was Excellent book detailing the beginning of the New Colombia. This book is over 6 years old, but it did an excellent job explaining who/what FARC is, not to mention the half a dozen other insurgent/ paramilitaries/ terrorist organizations, the diminished but still powerful cocaine cartels, the land owners and their private armies, not to mention a good history of the ever inept and corrupt succession of presidents keeping the wealth concentrated in the hands of the same less than one percent of the population.
It is a country that could be so great. It has so much going for it, between oil, gold, emeralds, amazingly productive soil for farming and a population by and large dying- sadly, literally- just trying to get ahead.
The number of people in the last 30 years who were "disappeared" a term all too familiar to Colombians is staggering. Far, far more than in Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Argentina or really anywhere else in the world.
This is a country where kidnappings were nearly a national pastime. This book also points out the Cocaine is NOT what made Colombia so violent, corrupt, and off limits to outsiders. It was just the newest and most publicized train wreck affecting the country.
Best of all this book will make most people want to visit this beautiful country. ( )