My new book, WHEN WE SOLD GOD'S EYE, is now in bookstores. Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, it tells the story of an Amazonian tribe that had no contact with the Western world until the 1960s and ended up running an illegal diamond mine — all through the eyes of a few Indigenous orphans who lived through it all.

ReviewS

“Powerful…. Cuadros, who spent years visiting the Cinta Larga to excavate their story, braids it all together into a riveting and largely seamless tale of approaching disaster.” — Carl Hoffman, THE WASHINGTON POST

“This book has the pace of a novel and the whodunit suspense of investigative journalism.” – Catherine Osborn, FOREIGN POLICY

“The book upends the trite Rousseauean archetype of the ‘noble savage’…. Instead, 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.” -- Ana Lankes, THE ECONOMIST

“At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself…. The Amazon rainforest today is under assault from myriad illicit enterprises, all of which Cuadros renders in vivid, unsentimental detail.” – André Pagliarini, THE NEW REPUBLIC

“Cuadros … 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 in its territory. Imagine Killers of the Flower Moon but set in Brazil instead of Oklahoma.” — Charles Petersen, N+1

“An unsentimental, vital report of how ‘civilised’ society disrupts Indigenous life.... [Cuadros] portrays his subjects – wide-boy Oita, the more sensitive Pio, the resilient Maria Beleza – as rounded individuals trying to navigate this new world of commerce, capitalism, temptation and laws. But this is no mere Rousseauean paradise lost, and Cuadros never shies from personal failings, domestic violence and petty jealousies: the brutality and hardship of the forest are portrayed unvarnished." — Oliver Basciano, ARTREVIEW

"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." — David Weiner, GOSSAMER

“An impassioned story with many parallels to the American Indian experience.” – KIRKUS (starred review)

“Cuadros offers a sympathetic, nuanced portrayal of the Cinta Larga people and their modern history.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL

“A vibrant, in-depth, and eye-opening account of conflict in the Amazon with dire cultural and environmental consequences.” ― BOOKLIST

“Cuadros depicts the Cinta Larga’s fall from grace with vivid prose…. Readers will be riveted.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)

BLURBS

“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

“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

"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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Cuadros achieves the remarkable feat of understanding and sympathizing with both sides’ attitudes, cultures, and motives, with a vibrant cast of real people.” ― JOHN HEMMING