Long Road South: The Pan American Highway

by Joseph R. Yogerst

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0792278445
• ISBN13: 9780792278443
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: National Geographic Society
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A hard book to find, but the pictures are worth the effort

The Long Road South narrates the travels of writer Joe Yogerst from northern Mexico to the tip of southern Argentina along the Inter American Highway. Yogerst traveled on and off with National Geographic photographers Susie Post and Melissa Farlow for several months in 1998 to make this book. The book contains five parts and follows Yogerst's travels southward. The Inter American Highway crosses a very diverse set of lands and peoples. The books starts at the border between America and Mexico, where armed guards monitor the highly charged crossing. It ends with a pink sky above the bluish ice riddled land at the tip of Argentina. Along the way the book shows the Sonoran cowboys of Mexico, the serenely blue Lago de Atitlan in Guatemala, glue sniffing children in the slums of Colombia and tango dancers in Argentina. To their credit, the three collaborators don't gloss over things. The book broaches some of the political problems endemic to the countries along the road. Yogerst chose to chronicle his journey in first person. This changes the hue of the book from traditional reportage toward a subjective storytelling approach. If this aspect adds life to the writing, it also means that the writing focuses as much upon the author's individual experiences as it does upon the countries along the highway. I'll leave it to you to decide how you feel about this -- it depends mainly on how you take your travel writing.In the spirit of most of the National Geographic Society's publications, the photography is special. In this case, the photography is of a level associated with the Society's magazine coverage. That makes sense, though, because both photographers have worked for National Geographic magazine in the past. In this collaboration, Melissa Farlow covers Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Chile while Susie Post photographs Central America, Colombia and Argentina. People interested in photography, travel, and Latin American culture will all find a lot in this book to interest them.The photographs from this book earned several national awards including several places in the 1999 Pictures of the Year Contest for individual photographs and a national travel writers award for the book as a whole.