Sweet Waist of America

Written by the author of "Coups and Cocaine", "Fool or Physician" and "Zanzibar to Timbuktu", this is a travel book-cum-autobiography of one of the most elusive and explosive countries in Central America, Guatemala. The pages of the Guatemala's telephone directory are perhaps the most accurate indication to the character of this most infamous military dictators and deposed politicians are listed alongside the thousands of missionary societies, grocery stores and faith healers. Sceptical medic, Anthony Daniels, set out to work his way south from the Mexican border, to explore central America. He got no further than Guatemala, and as he travels to the state-within-a-state of the University of San Carlos, where few ever graduate, to the Mountebank US faith healers promising to cure the crippled, by military helicopter to La Perla to work as a doctor, where the first man in the bloody guerilla war was shot, we begin to understand the fascination that bound him to the country. More than a travel book, this is both a work of history and a work of philosophy, set in a land by turns exciting, bemusing and - above all - unique.