Venezuela: A Portrait in the Caribbean

J.H. Galloway is a geography professor at the University of Toronto.

This brief book gives the impression of being the amateur production of
enthusiastic friends of Venezuela who want the country to be much better
known in Canada than it is, and visited by many more tourists. Other
friends of Venezuela, as well as its government, might find the book a
little embarrassing in its effusiveness. To the author, Venezuela is a
wonderful country, with wonderful beaches and wonderful food, inhabited
by wonderful people. His prose is gushing, uncritical, and occasionally
ungrammatical.

Singodia also doubled as photographer, and has published far too many
banal shots of tropical beaches. There are several blank and partially
blank pages for no apparent reason. The maps lack scales. The two maps
of the entire country, at either end of the book, prominently display a
“Zona en Reclamacion,” which neither the author nor the cartographer
explains. The zone is, in fact, the half of neighboring Guyana that
Venezuela insists is rightfully Venezuelan.

Unless one counts the brief Spanish-English glossary, the book does not
contain the basic types of information tourists need, such as a listing
and ranking of hotels and restaurants, and the cost of local travel.
Venezuela is indeed well worth visiting, and happily there are far
better guides to it than this.