When We Sold God's Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon

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 a?a? 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.

Author: Alex Cuadros
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 12/03/2024
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.1lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781538701508


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/2024 pg. 10
Publishers Weekly 09/09/2024
Kirkus Reviews 11/15/2024
Booklist 12/01/2024 pg. 102

About the Author
Alex Cuadros is the author of Brazillionaires: Wealth, Power, Decadence, and Hope in an American Country, which was a Financial Times best book of 2016. A former Bloomberg reporter, he's also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, and received support from the Pulitzer Center and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.