Chris Salewicz – Rude Boy: Once Upon a Time in Jamaica

Chris Salewicz first visited Jamaica in 1978. It was a life-changing experience, and over the next twenty years he was to return many times. The Island of Springs’ has a population of only 3 million but an impact on the world that far outweighs its size: from Bob Marley and reggae; through Obeah, voodoo and Rastafarianism; to, of course, ganja. Then there is piracy and slavery; political civil war; death squads or badmen’, and Yardie’ organised crime. In 1995 the house Chris was staying in was attacked by machete-wielding badmen’, a terrifying sequence of events that gives the book its structure. Part travelogue, part history, part memoir, Rude Boy gives us the complete Jamaican experience: the music, the violence, the drugs, but also the beauty.