Publishers Weekly
★ 09/09/2024
An Amazonian tribe fractures, turns to illegal pillaging of their own lands, and perpetrates a shocking massacre in this intricate and tragic account. Journalist Cuadros (Brazillionaires) follows the Cinta Larga of western Brazil after their first contact with white men in the 1960s. He paints their lives before contact as an idyll of hunting, horticulture, and feasting in the rainforest. (Downsides included bloody feuds and the exploitation of women.) Their encounters with non-Indigenous Brazilians featured occasional violence, but also curiosity and a hunger for the intruders’ steel tools—and finally a series of epidemics that left fewer than 400 survivors. Cuadros recaps the cross-cultural coming-of-age of Nacoça Pio, an orphaned boy who became a Cinta Larga leader skilled at working with government agencies and white settlers, and Oita Matino, a hot-headed, semicriminal hustler; both became involved in despoiling their tribe’s land, selling valuable but banned mahogany wood, and later operating an illegal diamond mine. The latter brought riches, but also conflict with white prospectors who resented their Indigenous bosses; in 2004, that tension exploded into a shocking killing spree. Cuadros depicts the Cinta Larga’s fall from grace with vivid prose (“Now he felt the full weight of open-eyed regret, a kind of regret his father could never have imagined, because his world was so much smaller”). Readers will be riveted. (Dec.)
From the Publisher
An extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, telling the gripping and astonishing story of how a small group in the Amazon, invaded and brutally treated by white settlers and miners, ended up exploiting an illicit diamond mine themselves. This is a complex and tragic story, deeply reported and beautifully written—a remarkable literary achievement.”—Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God
“This book reads like a wondrous combination of Heart of Darkness and In Cold Blood, a nonfiction novel of modern conquest, capitalism, and murder. Cuadros writes with unsentimental compassion and unflinching moral clarity, investing his protagonists with human complexity while still reckoning with the broader social forces driving the destruction of the Amazon. A stunning work.”—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth and Fordlandia
“To the shelf of anthropological classics that includes Gregory Bateson’s Naven, Levi Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, we can now add Alex Cuadros’s When We Sold God’s Eye. Cuadros takes us into one of the most forbidding regions of the globe, and inside the minds of an ancient people as they take their first―diseased, bloodstained―steps into so-called civilization. A first-class work of reporting, this book is above all a work of compassion for Indigenous peoples everywhere, forced to navigate a nearly impossible passage.”—Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Sontag
"When We Sold God's Eye raises the biggest questions of our time and, much to its credit, offers no easy answers. Like the Amazon itself, it is rich, fascinating, and totally alive."—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
“Truly remarkable reporting, opening a window into one of the planet’s most important places, and the people who live out their lives amidst its riches. It will complicate your view of the world, which is usually a useful thing.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
“Alex Cuadros spent years culturally embedded with the Cinta Larga, and tells their tragic but exciting story. He achieves the remarkable feat of understanding and sympathizing with both sides’ attitudes, cultures, and motives, with a vibrant cast of real people.”—John Hemming, author of The Conquest of the Incas and People of the Rainforest
"In this superbly written account, Alex Cuadros provides an intimate history of the Cintas Largas warriors of the Brazilian Amazon, and of the dramatic changes to their lives that have occurred over the past fifty years. By conducting extensive research in the field over several years, Cuadros has also lent his narrative an unusual degree of authenticity. In the annals of destruction of the world’s wildernesses and their indigenous peoples, When We Sold God’s Eye deserves widespread attention, and seems destined to become a modern classic of literary nonfiction."—Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and author of Che: A Revolutionary Life
"A remarkable feat of research embedded in vivid and compelling prose, When We Sold God’s Eye unveils the story of the once-isolated Cinta Larga people, whose lives and culture are transformed—at the hands of Western prospectors and conflicting government regulations—within the incomprehensible speed of a single generation. Bursting with wild, chaotic clashes of human values and exposing profound greed, corruption, violence, courage, survival, and the everyday contradictions within us all, When We Sold God’s Eye offers us new levels of understanding of Western society’s relationship to our earth and to cultures vastly different from our own. A must read, simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-filling."—Susan Southard, author of Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
"An Amazonian tribe fractures, turns to illegal pillaging of their own lands, and perpetuates a shocking massacre in this intricate and tragic account. Cuadros depicts the Cinta Larga's fall from grace in vivid prose. Readers will be riveted." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
