When We Sold God's Eye
Diamonds, Murder and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon 'A MODERN CLASSIC OF LITERARY NONFICTION' - JON LEE ANDERSON
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When We Sold God's Eye
Narrated by:
Alex Cuadros
Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Alex Cuadros
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By:
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Alex Cuadros
About this listen
'A non-fiction novel of modern conquest, capitalism and murder . . . a stunning work' GREG GRANDIN, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of FORDLANDIA
When We Sold God's Eye tells the astonishing true story of the Cinta Larga, an Amazonian tribe uncontacted by the Western world until the 1960s. Forced by the government to assimilate, they traded away their natural resources - exceptional diamonds - in exchange for the so-called comforts of industrial society. But one day, decades of trauma finally erupted into violence, in an act of vengeance that made headlines around the world.©2024 Alex Cuadros
Critic Reviews
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 (Carl Hoffman)
Extraordinary . . . Forces the reader to contend with the brutality that all humans are capable of when they receive sudden wealth and power
At the heart of Cuadros's lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself (Andre Pagliarini)
Fascinating . . . The quandaries play out on an intimate scale thanks to the details Cuadros gleaned in extensive interviews with Pio and his peers. This book has the pace of a novel and the whodunit suspense of investigative journalism
Cuadros, a veteran journalist of South American political economy, spent months on the ground reporting this story and years digging into the history and honing his sense for contradiction to a fine edge, revealing how a tribe found both freedom and catastrophe in the discovery of one of the world's largest diamond deposits . . . Imagine Killers of the Flower Moon but set in Brazil (Charles Petersen)
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)
Beyond just a tale of conquest and assimilation, When We Sold God's Eye is a page-turner of adventure and tragedy, more akin to a fiction thriller than a typical work of straightforward reporting. Cuadros translates - literally and figuratively - a group of fascinating real-life characters for the page, giving them a level of agency and dimension rarely achieved in stories like this. This is the type of deeply reported and carefully written book that the world needs more of (David Weiner)
An essential story, built on deep and empathetic reportage. A hugely impressive piece of work (Sophie Elmhirst, author)
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)
Penetrating and wise; this book lit up a part of life that I'd known nothing about (Noreen Masud, author)
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