MAGDALENA

The explorer, photographer, and prolific author returns to a country beloved since his boyhood to chronicle a river whose rehabilitation mirrors Colombia’s own.

Traveling to Colombia in the early 1970s from Canada, Davis—a professor of anthropology and former explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society whose book Into the Silence won the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize—regards the country as the place that first allowed him to “imagine and dream” and to give him “license to be free.” Davis’ popular book One River, published in a Spanish edition in 2002, was “a love letter to a nation by then scorned by the world,” still in the throes of the violence and corruption of drug cartels, which sadly marred the country’s reputation as a place of natural splendor. In his latest delightful journey, the author takes on the Magdalena, the so-called Mississippi of Colombia, which is celebrated for its legendary status as the life artery bringing food to the regions, exploration, trade, and commerce but also excoriated as a highway for the death and corruption that plagued the country for 50 years. Davis is a natural, engaging storyteller, and while he makes his way through Colombia’s history—from the early Tairona natives’ sophisticated civilization on the shores of the river, first contacted by the Spanish explorers in the early 16th century (and subsequently decimated), through the dark days of the drug wars of the 1980s and ’90s—the book is also an affecting account of on-the-ground exploration. The author skillfully weaves in accounts by academics, who have studied the vicissitudes of the river, and by the people who have lived and toiled along its shores. Many of these people have endured decades of political turmoil, beginning in 1946, when the Liberals and Conservatives “faced off in fratricidal conflict” known as La Violencia. This remarkable river has endured eras of massive extermination, erosion, damming, and pollution, but it has emerged renewed thanks to a people’s spirit and resilience.

An elegant narrative masterfully combining fine reporting and a moving personal journey.