Belize, a birds eye view
Posted at 10:03AM Apr 22, 2008 by geekgal
Lately the Lonely Planet community have been having an extremely lively discussion about guidebooks as a whole - how they should be created, what they should do for the reader, what is their role in a digital age.
Thorn Tree user Lan Sluder, founder of Belize First Magazine and the author of more than half a dozen books on Belize shares his review of Bruce Barcott's The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird and in doing so, adds another interesting angle to the debate.
Lan's argument is that this non-guide book is in many ways more successful than a conventional destination primer at conveying a factful, tangible and compelling sense of place.
He writes: "You probably won’t find Bruce Barcott's The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird in the travel book or nature guide sections of your bookstore, but it just may be the best field guide to Belize you'll ever read."
"Ostensibly the story of Sharon Matola, founder of the amazing Belize Zoo, and her campaign to defeat the Chalillo Dam on the Macal River in Western Belize and to save the nesting ground of what are believed to be the last 200 Scarlet Macaws in Belize, it's actually a 313-page crash course on Belizean culture, society and politics."
"It's also the most riveting, gossipy and entertaining book on the country since Richard Timothy Conroy’s 1997 memoir of British Honduras in the 1950s, Our Man in Belize.
Check out Lan's review in full here.
Related Thorn Tree Forum Branches: Central America
Category: CommunityHighlight | Tags: belize book review travel
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