At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay

Haven to Nazis, smugglers paradise, home to some of the earths 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 adventurers sang-froid, a historians erudition, and a sense of irony so keen you could cut a finger on it, Gimlette celebrates the beauty, horror andyescharm of South Americas obscure and remote island surrounded by land.

He takes readers from genteel drawing rooms in Asuncionwhere ladies still gossip about the nineteenth-century Irish adventuress who became Paraguays 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.