Over the weekend I finished Searching for El Dorado by Marc Herman.

Set mostly in Guyana, Herman traces the evolution of the search for gold in South America from the Spanish raiding the Inca's to the modern giant gold mines in Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.  He does a nice job of illustrating the "resources curse", where countries that depend overly on resource riches actually end up poorer, and of illustrating the day to day life of amateur gold miners.

Full of fascinating stories, well worth a read.