Book description
During the five years Jimmy Burns was based in Buenos Aires, which
resulted in his award-winning study of the Falklands War and its
aftermath,
The Land That Lost Its Heroes
, he also embarked on further-flung journeys in Argentina, Brazil, Peru,
Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile. 'Each South American country is
idiosyncratic - it brings out our individual fantasies and forces us to
interpret anew,' writes Burns. Certainly to travel with him is to trace
the footprints of history - conquest and subjugation, defiance and hope
- yet to encounter at each turn a fresh observation, the unexpected.
He conducts us by steam train up the Andes and down to the treacherous
depths of a Bolivian tin mine. We find a hotbed of Argentine loyalties
in Tierra del Fuego, beaches of bodies beautiful in Brazil and Peruvian
streets where fanatical Sendero Luminoso guerrillas wage a permanent
power struggle with the military.
Burns introduces us to Sixto Vazquez, Indian intellectual with an
unshakeable faith in legend and animism; to Tina, White Russian Duchess
of Platinov, who now presides over an eerie domain of enormous moths in
the Ecuadorian rain forest; to Father Renato Hevia, the editor of a
Jesuit magazine in Chile who is harassed and detained if he fails to
mention Pinochet in even one edition.
To this journey of discovery Jimmy Burns brings all the clarity of
vision and eloquence of expression for which he was awarded the 1988
Somerset Maugham Award for Non-fiction. Jimmy Burns was born in Madrid
in 1953. His father the late Tom Burns met his mother Mabel Maranon
while working in the British embassy in Madrid during the Second World
War. Jimmy contributes Spanish language media outlets and publishes his
books in Spanish translation as Jimmy Burns Maranon. His childhood was
spent straddling cultures -Britain, Castille, and Catalonia. He went to
school at a British school in Madrid, then a preparatory school in
London before studying for his O and A-levels at the Jesuit Stonyhurst
College in Lancashire.
He took a BA honours degree in Latin American & Iberian Studies at
University College, London and an MA in the politics and government of
Latin America at the Institute of Latin American Studies in London and
The London School of Economics and Political Science. On leaving
university, he spent two years teaching English to foreign students, and
travelling, gaining experience as a free-lance journalist writing about
Latin America and Spain.
In 1977 Jimmy joined the Financial Times
and was posted to Portugal as Lisbon correspondent, reporting also on Spain.
In mid-1986 he returned to London to work at the Financial Times
and prove himself as an author.
