Tales from the Sharp End - by Natascha Scott-Stokes (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Tales from the Sharp End: A Portrait of Chile is based on fifteen years of Natascha Scott-Stokes living and exploring the country of Chile. The book offers a vivid tapestry of stories ranging from history and culture to flora and fauna, woven into the author's own tales of adventure and heartbreak.

Chile is 4,300 kilometers long but a mere 350 kilometers at its widest, lined by the Andes to the east and the Pacific to the west. Traveling along the Pan-American Highway takes you to both the driest desert on earth and impenetrable cloud forests barring the way to Patagonian ice fields. Here is the true magnet of this jagged knife-edge of a country: the unique landscape born of its geography and the gorgeous plant and animal life there. Few things are more thrilling than climbing the coastal mountains to see both the Andes and the ocean at the same time, or to set eyes on the mighty River Baker churning through southern Patagonia.

Natascha Scott-Stokes offers both a love letter to Chile and a heartfelt lament for a country living at the sharp end of human folly and climate change.

Review Quotes

"Natascha Scott-Stokes offers readers the rare gift of combining an outsider's skeptical peek into a foreign land with an insider's keen grasp of Chile's cultural quirks and politics, dramatic turning points, and unparalleled landscape. Tales from the Sharp End is a witty, richly colored gaze at Chile from within."--Pascale Bonnefoy Miralles, author of The Investigative Brigade: Hunting Human Rights Criminals in Post-Pinochet Chile


"Tales from the Sharp End is a genuine pleasure to read. If you haven't yet visited Chile, you will want to after reading this book. Natascha Scott-Stokes has an engagingly personal writing style, and her portrait of Chile is rendered evocatively in a series of unforgettable stories about the nature, people, and history of the land she has come to feel a part of. There is humor and beauty here as well as bittersweetness. In the end, this is Natascha Scott-Stokes's ode to the place that she has chosen to live in and to love. Reading her, one cannot help but feel that she has given over a part of her soul to Chile, but that--delightfully for us--it has been a reciprocal exchange."--Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

"A most welcome addition to the literature on Chile. Natascha Scott-Stokes gives us a broad overview of this remarkable land, weaving together natural history, Spanish explorers and colonizers, and the country's troubled recent history."--Mary Helen Spooner, author of The General's Slow Retreat: Chile after Pinochet