When We Sold God's Eye
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
In this "remarkable" true story, an Amazonian tribe is forced to reconcile with Westerners entering their territory and running an illegal diamond mine (Douglas Preston).
Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita witnessed the first highway pierced through the century-old trees, and they lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new capitalist reality, discovering its wonders as well as its horrors. They forged an uneasy symbiosis with their white antagonists—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre; an act of retribution that made headlines across the globe.
Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God's Eye is a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of a vital ecosystem threatened by the hunger for natural resources; of genocide and revenge. Most of all, it’s about a few startlingly clever individuals and their power to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Journalist Alex Cuadros spins an engrossing true story of a clash of cultures ending in bloody reprisal. The Cinta Larga were an Indigenous people who lived for centuries in the rainforests of Brazil, where despite periods of violent conflict, they thrived as hunter-gatherers. In the 1960s, white outsiders discovered the Cinta Larga and treated them first as an anthropological find and later as a source of land, rare wood, and valuable minerals to be profitably exploited. While the tribespeople welcomed the introduction of metal tools, they were decimated by Western illnesses. When the Cinta Larga came to fully understand how they were being cheated, it led to a conflict that exploded into brutal violence. Cuadros is both a keen historian and a gifted storyteller, and When We Sold God’s Eye is a fascinating, slow-burning exercise in tragedy and suspense, amplified by the author’s straightforward but expressive narration. It’s one of the most exciting and shocking adventure stories of the year.
