"Dazzles and mystifies, with its lush anger, its impacted memory, its gorgeous desolation."
--The New York Times "A vivid, lush, seductive book that absolutely captures the look and light and life of the Brazilian wastelands and the hot, breathless African Slave Coast jungles. What an imagination Bruce Chatwin has!"
--The Wall Street Journal "Chatwin has a powerfully visual and aural style; sights and sounds crowd his sentences to the point that the book almost breathes."
--The New Yorker "Chatwin's book is both a luminous historical document and an exploitation of the surreal past. The author's talent for invoking history's black magic is evident."
--Time