Magdalena

River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia

By: Wade Davis

Narrated by: Wade Davis, Xandra Uribe

A captivating new book from Wade Davis--award-winning, best-selling author and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence for more than a decade--that brings vividly to life the story of the great Río Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and future

Travelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. Now in a masterly new book, Davis tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet. As Gabriel García Márquez once wrote during his own pilgrimage on the river: "The only reason I would like to be young again would be the chance to travel again on a freighter going up the Magdalena." Only in Colombia can a traveler wash ashore in a coastal desert, follow waterways through wetlands as wide as the sky, ascend narrow tracks through dense tropical forests, and reach verdant Andean valleys rising to soaring ice-clad summits. This rugged and impossible geography finds its perfect coefficient in the topography of the Colombian spirit: restive, potent, at times placid and calm, in moments explosive and wild.

Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry, and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation. And yet, always, it returns as a river of life.

At once an absorbing adventure and an inspiring tale of hope and redemption, Magdalena gives us a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of a nation on the verge of a new period of peace. Braiding together memoir, history, and journalism, Wade Davis tells the story of the country's most magnificent river, and in doing so, tells the epic story of Colombia.

Incredible narrative of the rio Magdalena

Highly recommend this book if you want to understand the history of Colombia and how intertwined it is with the great river.

Fantastic!

If you want to learn about the history, nature, people, and music of Colombia this is the book for you.
The book uses the Magdalena (the Mississippi of Colombia) as a foil to describe the nature and the stories of this most unique land. The breadth of the book is immense - from the freshwater manatees, to the atrocities of paramilitaries, to the history of the founding of the nation, to the evolution of cumbia.

The narration is spot on. Interesting, layered, book.

Increible

Passionate, scholarly, so well researched and told. Of great import to those who seek to understand one of the most complex and important areas in the world. Geography, ethnographic, you name it. Dystopian w. a bright glimmer of hope. Changed me.

'magic realism'

Wade Davis is a sensitive anthropologist and superb story teller. Even though "Magdalena" deals with some of the bloodiest and most violent passages of the history of Colombia, the elegance and precision of his descriptions transport the reader with ease to the natural theater of unfolding tragedies and accept their inevitable outcomes.
The comparison with "Love in the Time of Cholera" (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) a novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez is within easy reach: a question of 'similar differences' and 'different similarities', imagination and reality overflowing each other's boundaries — its setting also the Magdalena River.

Lo máximo

Fantastic job. Many thanks. Such a joy to listen to the author read the work.