Description Angels and Rabies follows the experiences of Mocha/Manchán on a journey through the Americas from a primal screaming commune in the Columbian Andes to contracting rabies in the Peruvian rainforest and falling in love with a Hollywood star.
Angels and Rabies is a true story, which delves into the culture and sociological makeup of the Americas, from its conquistador pioneers to today’s Disney Channel aficionados. Mocha, an inquiring and slightly unhinged young man, finds himself amidst the marginalised wherever he is: shamans murdering missionaries; Israeli conscripts seeking absolution; tree-huggers in love with loggers; cannabis growers influencing the CIA with mind-meld techniques; women addicted to menstrual blood and enema junkies seeking enlightenment. By burrowing beneath the skin of alternative societies from Ecuador to Seattle, Mocha reveals a radiograph of the bones and nerve-endings that make up the Americas. It’s a poignant and farcical book, wise and deranged; about adventure, love, transcendence and aspiration.
Author Manchán Magan has written, presented and co-produced a series of 50 travel documentaries exploring the people and cultures of China, the Middle East, India, South & North America, Greenland, Ireland and Eastern Europe.
His programmes appear on Travel Channel, TG4, RTE, YLE, SVT, Canal+ and France 5. His Global Nomad series has been sold to over 25 territories world-wide, from South Africa to Sweden to Russia.
A rollercoaster ride through the mad masala of modern India, a culture pole-vaulting from the middle ages to the future
“His writing is unashamedly sensual and he has an engagingly confessional narrative voice; his adventures are as poignant as they are hair-raising.“ Sunday Telegraph
This entertaining, offbeat travelogue by an Irish tv documentary maker is a true story of deluded maharajahs, murderous environmentalists, sex-obsessed yogis, and bizarre high-society belles. It stretches from women throwing themselves on funeral pyres in the deserts of Rajasthan, to mind-reading children in Himalayan forests and devious missionaries on the shores on the Ganges.
It begins in the Himalayas, where Manchán (aka Mocha) has blissfully dropped out, when suddenly he gets a call from his brother who is coming to India to make a tv travel series and wants him to present it. First, he has to sort out Tara, a patient in the local leper station who is threatened by the community for being gay; he brings him to Delhi, leaving him in the care of a band of hermaphrodite dancers.
Do the brothers succeed? Is Tara forced to make the ultimate sacrifice that the eunuchs demand? And what of the Norwegian man who begs Mocha/Manchán to track down a two thousand year old immortal yogi? It’s a bizarre and truly helter-skelter journey through the subcontinent, ending in triumph on the roof of the world with Manchán and his brother managing to befriend the Nepalese secret service and thereby escape years behind bars.
Manchán Magan is a writer, traveller and television maker. His documentaries, exploring the people and cultures of China, the Middle East, India, Greenland, South & North America, Ireland and Eastern Europe, have been sold around the world. His first book was the acclaimed Angels and Rabies: A Journey Through the Americas.
