Author: H. Marion Palmer
Genre: (Kids fiction) Geography
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
I stumbled across this book when I was searching for Mickey Sees the USA, a book written around the same time. I remember reading that one as a kid and loving it. I was so surprised to see how old these books were - written in 1945! There don't appear to be any more like them (no Daisy sees Europe or Goofy sees Australia unfortunately). They were affordable for being antiques, so I got both. It worked out really well since we were just wrapping up a rather long study of South America (we'd gone slowly country by country.)
Overall, this book was an enjoyable supplement, and I am glad we waited until we were finished with our studies, as the kids were familiar with most of the locations, and things made a lot more sense than if we would have just picked this up randomly.
Donald starts out planning to get to Colombia on a plane, but his seat is taken by some important South American politician, so he has to take a ship instead. But this allows him to go through the Panama Canal, which is kind of a cool experience. When he finally arrives in South America, he wants to see simply everything, and he demonstrates classic Donald Duck impatience when dealing with everyone, at one point having a guide show him ALL of Lima in one day. (We didn't find it particularly irritating. We all thought it was pretty funny.)
After arriving in Columbia he buys a honey bear and then loses it in the jungle a few chapters later. He goes to the market in Ecuador - and he gets into a rather humorous interaction with a vendor in which they both try to one-up each other with kind acts. He catches a condor in Peru with a lasso (rather, he tries to catch it but is actually yanked up into the air by it and ends up luring it back to the ground with some meat). He gets himself into trouble by posing as a guide in Chile, not knowing the lakes are all frozen in August. He spends some time with an indigenous shepherd family and their llamas, alpacas, and goats in Bolivia. He meets a beautiful Argentinian woman but can't speak to her in Spanish, then hires FIFTY tutors so he master the language, only to show up in Brazil and realize they don't actually speak Spanish but Portuguese. Finally, he becomes a hero in the end when he rescues one of his snobby shipmates.
The book touches on locations and customs in a pretty fun way. It's entertaining rather than overly dry/informative. There is one chapter I kind of thought was a waste of space ultimately. On the ship, he and the other passengers get "abducted" by something called the Order of Neptune, and they get dunked in the pool. It's just a silly thing they did on the ship, but it didn't seem to have anything to do with South America, and I would have preferred to have a chapter on Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana instead.
Speaking of which, the book is, of course, outdated in certain ways, but we didn't find it bothersome for the most part. Guyana is referred to on the map in this book as British Guiana. Suriname is Dutch Guiana, and French Guiana has the same name. I hadn't known about the former names since we only touched on those countries, so that was interesting. This book didn't cover them at all though, so that was disappointing.
Some of the people are referred to as "negros," so I am sure someone somewhere would find that offensive. I'm not actually sure if it was referring to certain indigenous people or what. The natives were referred to as Indians throughout also, and I know that's not PC in 202o either.
I don't actually know much about South American tourism, so I am sure there are plenty of other little things that are outdated (and the book certainly doesn't demonstrate how incredibly dangerous it is to go there now as a tourist. This was a completely different time in the world.)
My family and I really did enjoy this book!
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