What is John Gimlette reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: John Gimlette, author of Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge.

His entry begins:

Unfortunately, I can’t always be reading exactly what I want. Although I spend much of my time travelling and researching my journeys, I also have to keep up the ‘day job’, and – for me – that means working as a barrister, or trial advocate.

So what am I reading right now? Well, if I am honest, it’s a gruesome little book about what all the different parts of our body are worth. It has a dull name, The Judicial Studies Board Guidelines, but, quite literally, it puts a price on all our bits and pieces, from ears and eyes to our private parts. Of course, it’s not a catalogue, and it’s not trying to say what a severed arm is worth. It merely indicates what a judge would award you. In this, English law recognises that you can’t buy back the foot that you left on the railway, or the testicles the doctors accidentally lopped off. But there is a tariff, a sort of ‘going rate’ for not only your appendages but also your wits. Even madness has a price.

It’s a fascinating reflection on how we perceive bodies. Start with an arm. Lose one below the elbow and you get up to £72,000. Lose both and you get up to £197,000 (odd really. Losing both arms is surely ten times worse than only one?). A leg on the other hand is worth £92,000 whereas if you’re pruned of both you’re in for double that at £195,000 (again, a bit odd considering a double amputation will put paid to your chances of walking). This compares to loss of an eye (£43,000), a mouthful of teeth (£7,500), or a hand (£72,000). I can’t help feeling that in parts of the Islamic world a lost hand might...[read on]

Among the praise for Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge:

“Wild Coast is the best kind of travel writing: tough-minded and humorous, but above all thoughtful.”
—Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Wild Coast is funny, intelligent, revelatory.”
—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland

“A completely fascinating book. It opens up a forgotten corner of the world with tremendous flair and shrewd observation.”
—William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart

“A wonderfully entertaining account of a journey through one of the world’s least-known places ... Gimlette, an insatiably curious storyteller, revels in the strange mix of people and traditions ... Amid vivid descriptions of torrential rivers and golden grasslands that are home to some of the planets’ largest ants, otters, and fish, the author recalls encounters with a stunning variety of intriguing characters ... Colorful and immensely readable.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A few pages into his excellent new book, Wild Coast, John Gimlette tries to convey the forbiddingly impenetrable nature of his subject, the Guianas of northeastern South America, a nettlesome tangle of swamp, lowlands, crisscrossing creeks and rivers so resistant to navigation or settlement that the landscape remains one of the wildest, most unknown territories on the globe ... These are words to quicken the pulse of the armchair traveler, for whom no landscape resonates quite like the exotic, the hard to get to, the uncharted ... Between cellphones, Google Earth, and jumbo jets, it seems there’s nowhere in the world left to explore, but [writers like] John Gimlette prove that travel books still have something to tell us.”
—The Daily Beast

Learn more about the book and author at John Gimlette's website.

Writers Read: John Gimlette (April 2008).

Writers Read: John Gimlette.

--Marshal Zeringue