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When We Sold God’s Eye
Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon
Contributors
By Alex Cuadros
Formats and Prices
Price
$15.99Price
$20.99 CADFormat
Format:
- ebook $15.99 $20.99 CAD
- Hardcover $32.00 $41.00 CAD
- Audiobook Download (Unabridged) $27.99
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around December 3, 2024. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
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The "gripping and astonishing story" (Douglas Preston) of the Cinta Larga, a tribe that had no contact with the West until the 1960s and came to run an illegal diamond mine in the Amazon.
Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids 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—cars, refrigerators, TV sets, phones—as well as a way to acquire them: by selling the natural riches of their own forest home. They had to partner with the white men who’d hunted them, but their wealth grew legendary, the envy of the nation—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre, bloody retribution that made headlines across the globe.
Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God’s Eye tells a unique kind of adventure story, one that begins with a river journey by Theodore Roosevelt and ends with smugglers from New York City’s Diamond District. It’s a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of an ecosystem threatened by our hunger for resources; of genocide and revenge. It’s a tragedy as old as the first European encounters with Indigenous people, playing out in the present day. But most of all, it’s the moving saga of a few audacious individuals—Pio, Maria, Oita, and their friends—and their attempts to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.
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“So powerful…Cuadros, an American reporter who spent years living and working in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese, found the perfect man and incident to tell this achingly tragic story. And unlike so many others, he tells it from the point of view of the Indigenous people themselves, at a scale small enough to hold in your hand.”Washington Post
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"A devastating portrait of the toll that human rapacity exacts on individual lives...At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with a range of recognizable emotions and human motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself."The New Republic
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"Mr Cuadros’s book forces the reader to contend with the brutality that all humans are capable of when they receive sudden wealth and power. It also highlights the glaring failures of Brazil's bureaucracy. The story of the Cinta Larga continues to echo in contemporary Latin America."The Economist
- On Sale
- Dec 3, 2024
- Page Count
- 352 pages
- Publisher
- Grand Central Publishing
- ISBN-13
- 9781538701485
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