Chile is 4,300 kilometers long but never more than 350 kilometers wide, lined by the Andes to the east and the Pacific to the west, with the Pan-American Highway giving you just two choices: north or south. Natascha Scott-Stokes's remarkable travelogue is based on fifteen years of living and exploring this South American California.
Chile is 4,300 kilometers long but never more than 350 kilometers wide, lined by the Andes to the east and the Pacific to the west, with the Pan-American Highway giving you just two choices: north or south. Traveling along that dusty road takes you to both the driest desert on earth and to impenetrable cloud forests barring the way to Patagonian ice fields. Here is the true magnet of this jagged knife-edge of a country: the unique landscape born of its geography and the gorgeous plant and animal life. Few things are more thrilling than climbing the coastal mountains to see both the Andes and the Pacific at the same time.
Natascha Scott-Stokes's remarkable travelogue is based on fifteen years of living and exploring this South American California. Tales from the Sharp End: A Portrait of Chile offers both a love letter to Chile and a heartfelt lament for a country living at the sharp end of human folly and climate change.
Tales from the Sharp End is a genuine pleasure to read. If you haven’t yet visited Chile, you will want to after reading this book. Natascha Scott-Stokes has an engagingly personal writing style, and her portrait of Chile is rendered evocatively in a series of unforgettable stories about the nature, people, and history of the land she has come to feel a part of. There is humor and beauty here as well as bittersweetness. In the end, this is Natascha Scott-Stokes’s ode to the place that she has chosen to live in and to love. Reading her, one cannot help but feel that she has given over a part of her soul to Chile, but that—delightfully for us—it has been a reciprocal exchange." —Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
"Natascha Scott-Stokes offers readers the rare gift of combining an outsider’s skeptical peek into a foreign land with an insider’s keen grasp of Chile’s cultural quirks and politics, dramatic turning points, and unparalleled landscape. Tales from the Sharp End is a witty, richly colored gaze at Chile from within." —Pascale Bonnefoy Miralles, author of The Investigative Brigade: Hunting Human Rights Criminals in Post-Pinochet Chile
"A most welcome addition to the literature on Chile. Natascha Scott-Stokes gives us a broad overview of this remarkable land, weaving together natural history, Spanish explorers and colonizers, and the country’s troubled recent history." —Mary Helen Spooner, author of The General’s Slow Retreat: Chile after Pinochet
Natascha Scott-Stokes established herself as a pioneering traveler in 1989, when she became the first woman to travel the length of the Amazon River alone, a journey recorded in her book An Amazon and a Donkey.
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