Summary and Reviews of The Land That Never Was by David Sinclair

Media Reviews

Cleveland Plain Dealer - Daniel Dyer Sinclair writes with brio and with the confidence born of intimate knowledge of his subject. Only when he attempts to display all the myriad and sometimes twisted threads of MacGregor's financial machinations does his prose become an attractive but confusing cat's cradle.

Entertainment Weekly Sinclair ably turns MacGregor's hoax into a sinister marvel.

Booklist Starred Review. It's a yarn so remarkable that many wouldn't swallow it as fiction. Yet one devours Sinclair's limpid prose to find out whether and when MacGregor got his comeuppance...Hollywood couldn't create a more reprehensible, or more effective, scoundrel.

Kirkus Reviews The bizarre tale of a Central American land swindle that rivals for implausibility those country song lyrics about ocean-front property in Arizona. ....Sinclair does a masterful job explaining the intricacies of the swindle, though the absence of maps is regrettable. A top-notch survey of the vast dimensions of human greed.

Publishers Weekly ....the outrageous and tragic story of Poyais, a South American nation that, as the subtitle indicates, never actually existed....While the book suffers from a cumbersome foreword... Sinclair provides a fascinating glimpse into 19th-century conquest, warfare and utopian ideals.

Library Journal Although the book advertisement suggests that MacGregor was an eccentric rogue as lovable as he was scurrilous, Sinclair is not very successful--to this reviewer, at least--in making MacGregor and his land scam very lovable. Perhaps more useful is Sinclair's well-researched and clearly presented mini-portrait of the economic and social conditions of Britain in the 1820s and 1830s-conditions that made hoaxes such as MacGregor's imaginary Poyais seem attractive and persuasive.