About Lost & Found in Latin America:

This book aims to set the record straight. Too many people believe too many things about Latin America that simply are not true. What we think we know about Latin America is painfully wrong: stereotypes, innuendo and half-truths. The 2014 World Cup is shining an unprecedented bright spotlight on Brazil’s marvels and flaws, its beauty and pain, offering a fresh look beyond the clichés to discover Brazil and the rest of Latin America from a new perspective. Lost & Found in Latin America uses the World Cup as a springboard to show people and places, how big events affect everyday lives, discoveries and pratfalls, alluring beauty and haunting ugliness.

For more than thirty years, the author reported and traveled in nearly two dozen countries throughout the region. Meeting powerful and humble people, riding Amazon riverboats, climbing Andean glaciers, and getting stuck in remote places, he reveals little-known characteristics and delightful quirks with a sometimes whimsical, always entertaining singular narrative. Lost & Found In Latin America employs colorful vignettes to topple preconceptions and misconceptions.

Lost & Found in Latin America is partly a travel memoir of life on the road all over the region, but that is just a starting point. The author describes everyday life in overcrowded, chaotic cities as well as the pastoral countryside and storybook villages. He pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing the forces that hold people back from their full potential: corruption, greed and a lack of interest by the political and economic elites to improve conditions for the masses at the bottom. 

After reading Lost & Found in Latin America, readers will view and experience the region and its people in a whole new way.

See author John Wright's web page

Rainy City Publishing, P.O. Box 82813, Kenmore, WA 98028
info@rainycitypublishing.com

SOFTCOVER
248 pages, 6" x 9"; Appendixes; Index
978-0-61595-210-9
        Do You Know?

  • What do Mexicans call people north of the border? (No, not gringo)
  • Which Latin American country boasts the happiest people in the world?
  • What event do Brazilians consider their great national tragedy?
  • What does the word “tuna” mean in Spanish? (Clue: it’s not fish)
  • Which Central American nation is not part of Latin America?
  • Where did you get phone lines from brokers instead of the phone company?
  • Which Central American country has been at peace with its neighbors since abolishing the army more than 50 years ago?
  • What country colonized Suriname?
  • Which South American nation lies entirely outside the Tropic of Capricorn?
  • Where is Papiamento spoken?
  • What language do Brazilians speak?
  • Which two South American nations are landlocked?
  • Panama was part of which country before becoming independent?
  • Which major industrialized nation borders two developing countries in Latin America?
  • What’s the difference between a physical person and a juridical person?
  • Where are Panama hats made?
  • How did Tierra del Fuego get its name?
  • From Panama’s Caribbean coast, can you head eastward overland and reach the Pacific?


​“Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America”

– Gabriel Garcia Marquez
John Wright presents a copy of "Lost & Found in Latin America" to Brazilian great Gilberto Gil after his April 2015 concert in Seattle