The Tour Guide

INSIDE SOUTH AMERICA by John Gunther. 610 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

Most reporters patrol relatively limited beats--a courthouse, a capitol, a country, a war. John Gunther, 65, covers the earth, ceaselessly crossing borders and oceans as he works at his self-imposed task of describing "the known political world of today continent by continent." The global Gunther shelf lacks only an Inside Australia to be complete. But instead of visiting that continent, as he promised himself to do, Gunther confined his most recent trip to a new study of the ten countries Inside South America. He had been there before, in 1941, for Inside Latin America. But he went back because he is well aware that North Americans know all too little about their nearest neighbors and sometimes seem to care even less. "Ignorance," says Gunther, "plays a large role in this. What we do know we are apt to know wrong."

Ten Feet by Five Miles. Gunther makes an entertaining guide. He has a discerning eye for the arresting fact and the improbable statistic that not only sums up a complex situation but rivets the attention of the reader. Along his tour he notes that a farm in Chile, the beanpole country hugging 2,600 miles of the continent's west coast, can measure as little as ten feet in width and five miles in length. Paraguay, a landlocked dictatorship the size of California, has only 450 miles of paved roads, and in Venezuela, which is three times larger than Italy, the state railroad moves on a total of 220 miles of track. The armchair traveler learns that dueling is still legal in Uruguay, that Bolivian jails do not feed the prisoners (who must depend on handouts from friends or relatives), and that Recife, a Brazilian coast city of 1,000,000 population, has 40,000 registered prostitutes. Colombia boasts more than 700 varieties of orchids. Venezuela, on the other hand, has 32 kinds of eagles. In the Argentine, parents boost their offsprings' grades by bribing the schoolteacher; the price of a loaf of bread in Chile has gone up 300% in five years. In Peru, 7,266 landlords own 82.6% of the land, and in Colombia, where 300,000 have died during 20 years of La Viblencia--a kind of unextinguishable political civil war--the children of well-to-do families ride to school in armored cars.

Out of Focus. Such tidbits illuminate a subject; they do not necessarily explain it. In grappling with the riddle of South America, a continent that was colonized half a century before North America and is still trying to catch up with modern times, Tour Guide Gunther sometimes finds the going rough. He often relies on sweeping generalities ("few South Americans have ulcers"), on superlatives (Colombia is "one of the most difficult, complex and contradictory countries in the world"), and there are some oversimplifications that sometimes border on the absurd. "Why is the army so important?" he asks of Brazil. Gunther's answer: "Because it has arms." South America, as Gunther admits, is "difficult to generalize about. It lacks focus." The statistics are not always available--and when they are, they are not always reliable. In taking the continent's measure, Gunther confesses, he felt rather like the Emperor's tailor in prewar Japan, who was not permitted to touch the imperial figure and "had to estimate measurements while standing respectfully several yards away."

On the Brink. Gunther left South America with the conviction that it is "on the brink of revolution." Maybe-- but it has been on the brink for quite a while. In all, he spent only six months touring an area twice the size of the U.S., and his book, like all his other Insides, can hardly be expected to probe as deeply as the title suggests. But for all that, Inside South America is a valuable introduction to a continent that deserves more attention and more understanding than it usually gets.

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