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Rating: 
Summary: why only 5 stars ?
Review: My name is Gerhard, I live in Germany: this book is just great! Maybe you should extend your rate up to 10 stars. If so, please note, that my ranking is TEN stars for this remarkable novel. I hope that sooner or later this book will be available also in German, to a broader the audiance . Again :what a book. Regards GHE
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent tale from the end of the world
Review: This fascinating novel is based upon the true (and famous) story of a native of Tierra del Fuego known to the English as "Jemmy Button." He was a Yamana Native American who, along with two other natives, was taken by Captain Robert Fitzroy from the Yamanas' home at the tip of South America and transported aboard the Beagle to England, where the Yamanas were educated and instructed in the ways of British culture and language. They eventually became celebrities, meeting and impressing the royal family. Button was later returned to Tierra del Fuego by FitzRoy (this time on the voyage of the Beagle that included a young naturalist named Charles Darwin). The Yamanas were left in Tierra del Fuego with materials to construct an English house, as well as utensils and other items of European domestic life; and with the expectation that these properly instructed savages would serve as a vanguard for the expansion of British civilization in their remote land. Instead, the house-building materials quickly fell to ruin, and the "civilized" Yamanas eventually became involved in an armed conflict with English missionaries. The resulting trial of Button in the Falkland Islands serves as the focus of this story, which is told through the eyes of a fictional Argentine, John William Guevara - a man who carries the name of his criolla mother, rather than his English father. The distinguished Argentine writer Sylvia Iparraguirre has done far more than weave an interesting historical novel - she has constructed a moving story of the ambiguities of a son's love for his father, of a second-generation immigrant's doomed attraction to the plains of Patagonia, and of the inevitable and irreconcilable conflict between cultures, not merely between those of the Yamana and the British, but also between those cultures and the Argentine. I highly recommend this book. I read it in the original Spanish. If you want to read the English translation, you should be very careful to order that version. Those who are interested in the topic may also wish to read Chapter 10 of Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle," and Bruce Chatwin's "In Patagonia," as well as "Savage: the Life and Times of Jemmy Button," by Nick Hazelwood.
Rating:
Summary: REVIEW QUOTES
Review: TIERRA DEL FUEGO has received two major awards: The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award for the best work of fiction by a woman and The Best Book of the Year Award at the Buenos Aires Book Fair. "This brilliant and beautifully wrought work deserves to become a classic." --The Texas Observer "TIERRA DEL FUEGO has won two major Latin American awards, and justifiably so: Iparraguirre has crafted an entrancing novel from the skeleton of facts we know about this ghastly episode in English colonial history." --The Bloomsbury Review "This tale is brilliantly told..." --National Hispanic News "Iparraguirre has constructed a well-documented novel, with strong humanistic feeling, where personal traits and the twists and turns of the plot are skillfully woven through the genre of a novel blended with a historical chronicle. It is a fresh look at those barbarous ancestors who were destroyed by civilization."
--World Press Review
Rating:
Summary: REVIEW QUOTES
Review: TIERRA DEL FUEGO has received two major awards: The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award for the best work of fiction by a woman and The Best Book of the Year Award at the Buenos Aires Book Fair. "This brilliant and beautifully wrought work deserves to become a classic." --The Texas Observer "TIERRA DEL FUEGO has won two major Latin American awards, and justifiably so: Iparraguirre has crafted an entrancing novel from the skeleton of facts we know about this ghastly episode in English colonial history." --The Bloomsbury Review "This tale is brilliantly told..." --National Hispanic News "Iparraguirre has constructed a well-documented novel, with strong humanistic feeling, where personal traits and the twists and turns of the plot are skillfully woven through the genre of a novel blended with a historical chronicle. It is a fresh look at those barbarous ancestors who were destroyed by civilization."
--World Press Review
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