My new book, WHEN WE SOLD GOD'S EYE, will be published on December 3, 2024. Click here to preorder!
“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 stunning literary achievement.” ― DOUGLAS PRESTON, 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, author of The End of the Myth
"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, author of The Sixth Extinction
“To the shelf of anthropological classics that includes Naven, Tristes Tropiques, and Coming of Age in Samoa, we can now add 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, author of Sontag
“An unusually authentic and intimate account of a disappearing wilderness and its Indigenous people. Superbly written, it deserves widespread attention, and seems destined to become a modern classic of literary nonfiction.” — JON LEE ANDERSON, author of Che Guevara
“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
“Bursting with wild clashes of human values and exposing profound greed, corruption, violence, courage, survival, and the everyday contradictions within us all, this book offers us a new understanding of Western society’s relationship to earth and to other cultures. A must-read, simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-filling.” — SUSAN SOUTHARD, author of Nagasaki
“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
“Cuadros depicts the Cinta Larga’s fall from grace with vivid prose…. Readers will be riveted.”— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)