Rating: 
Summary: Superficial, sometimes boring
Review: I was very dissapointed when I first read this so famoues book, that many people interested in Patagonia use to read.
The autor has a very superficial point of view of this territory and its people, there's no deep sight in the stories of the people themselves, who are seen merely as some kind of zoo animals, besides the only detailed descriptions the autor makes is about physical appearence (fat, slim, dark, no teeth, wrinkles, ugly, etc.), specially if they are men, what could tell us a lot about him.
Some of the stories are quite absurd and show that he didn't understand a thing about Patagonia, sometimes centered in romantic stories of fugitives from the far west, yes, a part of the legend of patagonia, but...
And finally, the sometimes racist comments on people, specially indians and chileans workers on the estancias (he always describe them as lazy and drunk!!!)
Rating: 
Summary: In Patagonia Meet Bruce Chatwin!
Review: In Patagonia is not only a great book, but it is also a great introduction to a brilliant author.
It was Bruce Chatwin's first published book. It recounts Chatwin's wide and varied travels in southern Chile and Argentina, known collectively as 'Patagonia'.
Chatwin's lively, stylish prose records the people and places that he saw on his six month tour of Patagonia. He colourfully describes the history, mythology and literary context of this strange place.
The book introduces the reader to some of Chatwin's most enduring literary themes: such as his fascination with a travelling or 'nomadic' lifestyle and his interest in the exotic and strange;
It sets the stage for later works such as The Viceroy of Ouidah and The Songlines.
My advice: READ IT!
Rating: 
Summary: In Patagonia is unforgettable.
Review: In Patagonia is unforgettable. Chatwin creates a frontier of possibilities, and populates it with stories of the living and the dead. In Patagonia is about travel and transience, settlement and desolation, Butch and Sundance, Evita and exile, memory and ghosts, dinosaurs and loneliness, the wind and the land, Welshmen and Lithuanians, and beauty. Read it
Rating:
Summary: Cast not thy pearls before penguins....
Review: IN PATAGONIA is, simply put, two hundred pages of crisp, elegant, and enjoyable prose. This is a rare thing. This book is not a travel guide a la Fodor's nor is it a piece of journalism. Some of the reviewers below hold this against Mr. Chatwin. I suspect most potential readers will not.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant hodge-podge!
Review: Often deemed 'a classic' of travel literature, Bruce Chatwin's claim to fame, 'In Patagonia,' defies classification. Anyone looking for a straightforward account of Southern Argentina and Chile would best be advised to check elsewhere. But those who hunger for literary experiences that enchant, engage and fascinate without end, pick up this book ASAP!
As an ardent Chatwinophile, I expected to be bowled over with rich prose and endless mountains of the most esoteric information, the standard Chatwin fare. I wasn't disappointed. 'In Patagonia' is a brilliant hodge-podge of history, anthropology, ethnography and good old-fashioned yarn-spinning. And if anybody can tell a story, Chatwin is the one. Each page overflows with gripping descriptions of the strange mixture of peoples who make up this forgotten land. You're led through communities of Welsh Methodists, Lithuanian eccentrics and Spanish anarchists, all exiles to this bleak land of sagebrush and glaciers. Chatwin's clean and sparing style 'paints' each character, each anecdote with sharp, jarring colors. Your imagination is thrown into overdrive as each story jumps off the page and buries itself in your mind. Glacial winds chafe the face, the din of a thousand penguins deafens and the bitter smile of the Patagonian exile tugs at the heart.
Chatwin's style was his genius and his downfall. As was said of Emerson, Chatwin 'doesn't give the reader enough to chew on.' Sparse, clear and always adorned with odd facts and exotic images, Chatwin's sentences are those of the journalist turned artist. The sheer volume of fact and anecdote threatens to swallow the reader up...detailed diary accounts of Darwin's voyage...eyewitness renderings of Butch Cassidy's exile days...an intricate explanation of the local Yamana tribe's linguistic world...How to make sense of it all and complete the picture of Patagonia and its people? Difficult work at best. You are thrown so much and from so many angles, it's best to just sit back and simply be overwhelmed. So, arm-chair travellers and connoisseurs of fine prose, follow this nomad of nomads into an amazing world of stark beauty and even starker lives.
Rating: 
Summary: "In Patagonia" doesn't live up to the hype.
Review: Reviews of Bruce Chatwin's "In Patagonia" tend to gush emotionally about Chatwin's spare verse and quirky sketches of colorful characters. Others have claimed to have used his book as a guide while living in Patagonia. As much as Chatwin's now-famous travelogue offers pleasant reading, it still pales in comparison to other Patagonian travel books, including "Edward Chace, A Yankee in Patagonia." Chatwin also liberally hijacked ideas straight from previous authors, who made his journey and investigated the same people and subjects a full four or five decades before the publication of "In Patagonia." What's more, the locals down there (and a Ph.D candidate in Patagonia history I met on my journeys) hate Chatwin, claiming he was sloppy with his facts about their relatives. Chatwin's name in Patagonia is as popular as General Sherman's in Atlanta. So don't get overwhelmed by the Chatwin hype. Browse the Patagonian classics you'll find on most library shelves first, then reread this so-called masterpiece. Comparative shopping is worth the effort here.
Rating:
Summary: A classical of travel books
Review: Starting a journey to one of the most mytical places on earth with an objective as vague and mytical as of Chatwin is a great begging for a book. The search for a ancestor place on history and the recount of his whereabouts on Patagonia with people from almost every place on earth is the book shortest description.
The search for an identity, a purpose in life are the main focus of the book. The beatifull description of Patagonia and its people are extraordinary.
Rating:
Summary: A place you can't imagine...
Review: The late Bruce Chatwin, a British travel writer, draws the reader into one of the least known, desolate, and brutal lands in the world. The southern end of the Southern Cone (the piece of land that makes up the bottom half of Chile and Argentina). As a child, Chatwin is drawn to Patagonia by the recollection of and fascination with a piece of furry skin his great cousin brought back from the region. A Great Wooley Mammoth or brontosaurus (his grandmother told him when he was a child) which seemed to offer up the entire pre-historic world to him. Through his travel notes and wry observations as well as the historical research, Chatwin gives us a picture of this harsh land which provided refuge for outlaws and bandits (some as famous as Butch Cassidy), and was home to the most bizarre European and American self-imposed refugees. His examination of Darwin's journeys and experiences in Patagonia give the reader a window through which we can begin to understand how the scientific world was thinking at the time.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down - I even read it under my desk at work
Review: This is a wonderful collection of tall tales, fiction, fact and bizarre anecdotes, loosely connected by their association with a sparsely populated part of South America. Unfortunately critics and publishers in their obsessive need to categorise books, called it a Travel Book. This was misleading, as are the claims that he reinvented travel writing or had some sort of unique insight into Patagonia, its people, history and landscape. Chatwin was primarily a storyteller, not a travel writer or an expert on Southern Argentina. His talent for the 5-6 page yarn is unparalleled in modern literature and this is as good as anything he wrote.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficial, silly, and utterly too-too
Review: To be perfectly honest I did not read every page of this exraordinarily silly and superficial book. I read the first third and the last third and decided to let the middle section take care of itself. The tiresome, too precious narrative voice flits like a nervous bird over a vast area of South America never lighting long enough anywhere to take a careful look at what there is. Just a few condescending remarks about skin or hair color, shabby clothing, derelict housing, and shameful dentition.And then on to the next jerk water town for more of the same. The book contains some pseudo-attempts at history but they are so obvious as to be questionable as regards facts; and also a bit of philolgy which is execrable because it is just plain wrong. This book offers, in fact, not a single solid or serious idea. When I read Nicholas Shakespeare's supremely well written biography of Chatwin I realized I was reading about a person I would not like if I met him. But this should not keep me from enjoying the beauty of his writing. Well, everybody seemed to be saying his writing was beautiful but I fear everybody was wrong. His writing is not beautiful. As English prose it is barely acceptable.
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