Meet Daniel Cooper, a young American searching for a way to escape the predicitability of life in the United States. Lured by wonderlust, Daniel travels to the Amazonian village of Los Puentes Caidos- a seductive hamlet of magicial realities where human nature, Mother Nature, and the nature of truth converge in tropical excess. There, old Santiago, a philosophic seeker, has formed his Drinking and Thinking Club. This curious "Thinkery" includes a skeptical war veteran, a noble dwarf, a far-seeing blind man, and assorted other questioners who spend their time drinking beer, sucking lemons, and reflecting- quite imaginatively and often amusingly- on the nature of freedom, truth, death and women. Daniel joins this club hoping to reclaim both his lost soul and Santiago's devastatingly beautiful and mysteriuos daughter, Angelina. But Daniel is up against stiff competition in the likes of Hector Tanbueno, the cunning jungle guide whose strange brand of sadism implicates him in natural disasters, unnatural accidents, and mysterious disappearances and murders. In the midst of Santiago's explorations and Hector's exploits, the village of Los Puentes Caidos is beseiged by a series of horros: floods, frogs, wasps, famous Frenchmen and, finally, a fatal tropical brain fever whose symptoms include an urge to waltz and a love of one's neighbor. As witness to the village's strange descent into madness, Daniel finds himself. He discovers- to his mutual horror and satisfaction- how his own fate is inextricably linked to the fate of Los Puentes Caidos.

A strange book, and highly imaginative, but not too bad of a read.

Released on Saturday, December 25, 2004 at about 12:00:00 PM BX time (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada) at Rest Area near mile marker 113 in I-85 Rest Area before mile marker 113, Georgia USA.

RELEASE NOTES:

Left on a bench right outside men's bathroom.