Travelers' Tales Central America: True Stories [Paperback]

Larry Habegger (Editor), Natanya Pearlman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 12, 2002 | Series: Travelers' Tales Guides

These stories of travel in Central America — Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama — are adventurous and quirky, sobering and enlightening. Readers visit a Panamanian island known for its wildlife; glimpse the wealthy Generation X repatriates of Nicaragua; and meet a charming Guatemalan revolutionary. Authors include Paul Theroux, Jennifer Harbury, Ronald Wright, Joan Didion, Randy Wayne White, and Rigoberta Menchu. Travelers’ Tales Central America provides a new window into this astonishingly beautiful and complex part of the world. “For the thoughtful traveler, these books are an invaluable resource.” — Pico Iyer

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Travelers' Tales; First Edition edition (March 12, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885211740
• ISBN-13: 978-1885211743
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #501,549 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew up in Minnesota in a family of seven children, all boys until the last one. After graduating from Dartmouth College I began to travel (I wished I'd been doing it while in college!) and found that writing about my experiences helped me understand the places and cultures I was encountering. I also discovered that newspaper and magazine editors responded as well, and that's how I got started working as a freelance writer. Not long after that I hooked up with James O'Reilly to write a series of mystery serials for the San Francisco Examiner, one of which ran for 104 episodes over five months. We then began writing travel stories together and in 1985 started a syndicated column, World Travel Watch, that has appeared in newspapers in five countries. In 1993 we founded Travelers' Tales with James's brother Tim O'Reilly, and since then we've published some 100 books. I teach workshops on the art and craft of the personal travel story on a regular basis: for information go to LarryHabegger.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An exceptionally well-crafted collection impressions of Latin America, September 11, 2005

By 

John D. Sherwood (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Travelers' Tales Central America: True Stories (Paperback)

I am not a huge fan of anthologies of articles because they often lack the narrative flow and coherence of a book written by a single author. With that being said, Traveler's Tales Central America is a cut above the standard anthology for several reasons. First, the articles focus on a single, relatively small geographic region-Central America (Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama). The narrow geography of Latin America bind the stories together much better than say, the stories in the Best American Travel Writing series, which cover all corners of the globe.

Second, many of the articles did not appear in mainstream travel magazines such as Conde Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure, Budget Travel, etc. Instead, Larry Habegger and Natanya Pearlman, the book's editors, have gone out of the way to find some interesting pieces written by relatively obscure authors.

One of my favorites is a retired Pan Am pilot named Joseph Diedrich who writes about an encounter at a hotel with a beautiful woman who enjoys smuggling jaguars to the United States from Guatemala simply for the thrill of it. Another memorable one, "The Rainbow Special" by Cara Tabachnick, describes a hilarious gathering of hippies on the shores of Lago Atitlán in Guatemala where everyone finds spiritual truth in a simple bowl of hummus soup.

In addition to some obscure gems, Traveler's Tales Central America also includes pieces written by writers at the top of their game such as Tim Cahill and Paul Theroux. Cahill's essay about a drive in Honduras is ho hum, but Theroux's chronicle of a train ride through Costa Rica ranks as one of the best articles in the book, especially since the train he took no longer exists.

Traveler's Tales Central America ends with some stories that still haunt me. Jennifer K. Harbury tells the story of her first encounter in the rugged mountains of Guatemala with her husband Everado, a guerilla who was ultimately abducted and murdered by the CIA. In "Deceptive Moonrise," a female backpacker reveals how a tropical paradise became a nightmare one night on an island off the coast of Belize. Traveler's Tales Central America, in short, is not just fodder for readers with short attention spans, but an exceptionally well-crafted collection impressions of a region of the world close in proximity to the United States but culturally very distant. I can't wait until the publisher comes out with a similar book for South America.