
Magdalena
River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia
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Narrated by:
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Wade Davis
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Xandra Uribe
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By:
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Wade Davis
About this listen
A captivating new book from Wade Davis - award-winning, best-selling author and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence for more than a decade - that brings vividly to life the story of the great Río Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and future.
Travelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. Now in a masterly new book, Davis tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet. As Gabriel García Márquez once wrote during his own pilgrimage on the river: "The only reason I would like to be young again would be the chance to travel again on a freighter going up the Magdalena". Only in Colombia can a traveler wash ashore in a coastal desert, follow waterways through wetlands as wide as the sky, ascend narrow tracks through dense tropical forests, and reach verdant Andean valleys rising to soaring ice-clad summits. This rugged and impossible geography finds its perfect coefficient in the topography of the Colombian spirit: restive, potent, at times placid and calm, in moments explosive and wild.
Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry, and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation. And yet, always, it returns as a river of life.
At once an absorbing adventure and an inspiring tale of hope and redemption, Magdalena gives us a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of a nation on the verge of a new period of peace. Braiding together memoir, history, and journalism, Wade Davis tells the story of the country's most magnificent river, and in doing so, tells the epic story of Colombia.
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Critic reviews
"This shimmering portrait of the Río Magdalena, evoking its moods and depths, ultimately reveals the complicated nation those waters sustain and reflect. Never wincing from dark histories, yet never abandoning hope, Wade Davis shows us why Colombia stole his heart as a young traveler and holds it still." (Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders)
"Illustrative... Davis's deep knowledge of and decades-long familiarity with Colombia notwithstanding, the freshest and most insightful sections occur when he is in the company of resident experts, and he is gracious enough to acknowledge that debt... Illuminating." (The Times Literary Supplement)
"Ardent.... Davis stocks his lively narrative with piquant characters, dramatic historical set pieces, and lyrical nature writing.... The result is a rich, fascinating study of how nature and a people shape each other." (Publishers Weekly, starred)
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Story
The man behind some of the greatest political changes of the last decade, David Axelrod has devoted a lifetime to questioning political certainties and daring to bring fresh thinking into the political landscape. Whether as a child hearing John F. Kennedy stump in New York or as a strategist guiding the first African American to the White House, Axelrod shows in Believer how his own life stands at the center of the tumultuous American century.
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Love letter to Obama
- By DaWoolf on 03-15-15
By: David Axelrod
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A Death in Malta
- An Assassination and a Family's Quest for Justice
- By: Paul Caruana Galizia
- Narrated by: Paul Caruana Galizia
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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An archipelago off the southern coast of Italy, Malta is a picturesque gem eroded by a climate of corruption, polarization, inequality, and a virtual absence of civic spirit. In this unpromising soil, a fearless journalist took root. Daphne Caruana Galizia fashioned herself into the country’s lonely voice of conscience, her muckraking and editorializing sending shock waves that threatened to topple those in power and made her at once the island’s best-known figure and its most reviled. In 2017, a campaign of intimidation against her culminated in a car bombing that took her life.
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Wow…just shocking
- By Kathy Roy on 06-19-24
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Prisoner of Lies
- Jack Downey's Cold War
- By: Barry Werth
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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John (Jack) Downey, Jr., was a new Yale graduate in the post-World War II years who, like other Yale grads, was recruited by the young CIA. He joined the Agency and was sent to Japan in 1952, during the Korean War. In a violation of protocol, he took part in an air drop that failed and was captured over China. His sources on the ground had been compromised, and his identity was known. Although he first tried to deny who he was, he eventually admitted the truth. But government policy forbade ever acknowledging the identity of spies, no matter the consequences.
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The Jack I knew
- By Frederick P. Leaf on 12-10-24
By: Barry Werth
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The Order
- By: Kevin Flynn
- Narrated by: Gibson Frazier
- Length: 20 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Two courageous investigative journalists deliver an insider’s account of the “silent brotherhood”—the most dangerous radical-right hate group to surface since the Ku Klux Klan. They claim to be patriots, as American as apple pie, but they are this nation’s deadly brotherhood—hate groups that package their alienation against the federal government under such names as the Aryan Nation, the Order, and other white supremacist militias.
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Not very interesting
- By Anonymous User on 03-05-25
By: Kevin Flynn
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Where We Meet the World
- The Story of the Senses
- By: Ashley Ward
- Narrated by: David Morley Hale
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Our senses are what make life worth living. They allow us to appreciate a sip of an ice-cold drink, the sound of laughter, the touch of a lover. But only recently have incredible advances in sensory biology given us the ability to understand how and why our senses evolved as they have. In this book, biologist Ashley Ward takes listeners on a breathtaking tour of how our senses function. Ward looks at not only the five major senses—vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—but also a host of other senses, such as balance and interoception, the sense of the body’s internal state.
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You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles!
- By Jefferson on 03-22-24
By: Ashley Ward
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The 108 Upanishads
- An Introduction
- By: Roshen Dalal
- Narrated by: Suchitra Gupta
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is a thoroughly researched primer on the 108 Upanishads, philosophical treatises that form a part of the Vedas, the revered Hindu texts. These Upanishads contain the most crystallized bits of wisdom gleaned from Hinduism. Roshen Dalal explains the concepts at the core of each Upanishad clearly and lucidly. Moreover, her vast, diverse philosophical and theological readings add priceless scholarly context to this comprehensive and fascinating volume.
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Obsessive categorization
- By Hasan on 01-19-20
By: Roshen Dalal
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Last Hope Island
- Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War
- By: Lynne Olson
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Kimberly Farr
- Length: 18 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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A groundbreaking account of how Britain became the base of operations for the exiled leaders of Europe in their desperate struggle to reclaim their continent from Hitler, from the New York Times best-selling author of Citizens of London and Those Angry Days.
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Not What I Expected--More What I Needed to Know
- By DanD on 06-25-17
By: Lynne Olson
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Tiny but Mighty
- Kitten Lady's Guide to Saving the Most Vulnerable Felines
- By: Hannah Shaw
- Narrated by: Hannah Shaw
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Hannah Shaw, better known as Kitten Lady, has dedicated her life to saving the tiniest felines, but one doesn't have to be a professional kitten rescuer to change - and save - lives. In Tiny but Mighty, Hannah not only outlines the dangers newborn kittens face and how she combats them, but how you can help every step of the way, from fighting feline overpopulation on the streets to fostering unweaned kittens, from combating illness to combating compassion fatigue, from finding a vet to finding the purrfect forever home.
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The book I wish I had a long, long time ago
- By Ashley Kotkin on 08-11-19
By: Hannah Shaw
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Magnificent Rebels
- The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
- By: Andrea Wulf
- Narrated by: Julie Teal
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, how can I be free? It all began in the 1790s in a quiet university town in Germany when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, writing, and their lives.
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fascinating overall, too much drama
- By soup cook on 11-27-22
By: Andrea Wulf
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Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
- Essays
- By: Barry Lopez, Rebecca Solnit - introduction
- Narrated by: James Naughton, Rebecca Solnit
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed much of what was dear to him in his home place and the community around it—a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he’d long warned.
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Intense and beautifully personal
- By Karen West on 06-28-23
By: Barry Lopez, and others
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Water
- A Biography
- By: Giulio Boccaletti
- Narrated by: Giulio Boccaletti
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Giulio Boccaletti - honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers.
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Understand Built-Environment Governance~Know Water
- By Tom on 05-11-22
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The Manuscripts Club
- The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts
- By: Christopher de Hamel
- Narrated by: John Lee, Christopher de Hamel
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. However, we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years.
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Manuscripts Through the Centuries
- By Tbaley on 12-02-23
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Into the Storm
- Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival
- By: Tristram Korten
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In late September 2015, Hurricane Joaquin swept past the Bahamas and swallowed a pair of cargo vessels in its destructive path: El Faro, a 790-foot American behemoth with a crew of 33, and the Minouche, a 230-foot freighter with a dozen sailors aboard. From the parallel stories of these ships and their final journeys, Tristram Korten weaves a remarkable tale of two veteran sea captains from very different worlds, the harrowing ordeals of their desperate crews, and the Coast Guard’s extraordinary battle against a storm that defied prediction.
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Just average
- By Rickmeister on 03-13-20
By: Tristram Korten
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Our Tribal Future
- How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good
- By: David R. Samson
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Tribalism is one of the most complex and ancient evolutionary forces; it gave us the capacity for cooperation and competition, and allowed us to navigate increasingly complex social landscapes. It is so powerful that it can predict our behavior even better than race, class, gender, or religion. But in our vast modern world, has this blessing become a curse? Our Tribal Future explores a central paradox of our species: how altruism, community, kindness, and genocide are all driven by the same core adaptation.
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Best Game Plan Yet for Unfucking the World
- By Rob R. on 07-26-23
By: David R. Samson
Incredible narrative of the rio Magdalena
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The comparison with "Love in the Time of Cholera" (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) a novel by Colombian Nobel prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez is within easy reach: a question of 'similar differences' and 'different similarities', imagination and reality overflowing each other's boundaries — its setting also the Magdalena River.
'magic realism'
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Lo máximo
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The book uses the Magdalena (the Mississippi of Colombia) as a foil to describe the nature and the stories of this most unique land. The breadth of the book is immense - from the freshwater manatees, to the atrocities of paramilitaries, to the history of the founding of the nation, to the evolution of cumbia.
The narration is spot on. Interesting, layered, book.
Fantastic!
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Increible
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Magdalena River of dreams
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Living in Colombia
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Amazing tour through the time and place that left me unduly impressed and hopeful.
The history as told with reference to the Rio Magdalena is unforgettable logical and truly magical
Thank you Wade
Incredible, opened my eyes wide
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I need to go to Colombia NOW!! post covid...;)
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Fantastic portrait of a Land and People
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