Reviews

In 1975 anthropology student Good went to Venezuelan Amazonia for a 15-month study of the Yanomama, a Stone Age tribe of the rain forest, characterized as ``a fierce people'' by their discoverer, Napoleon Chagnon, also Good's teacher. Within the year, Good had come to admire the Yanomama way of life; he learned their language and moved his hammock into their compound. When the headman suggested that Good needed a wife, he accepted nine-year-old Yarima and waited for her to come of age. He fell in love with Yarima, then, as an outsider, found himself in trouble with Venezuelan officialdom and in danger of losing her. Having stayed 12 years, Good returned to the U.S., bringing his wife with him; he now teaches at Jersey City State College in N.J. His story, written with freelancer Chanoff, is spellbinding on both the anthropological and personal levels. Photos. (Jan.)

This is an extraordinarily human account of the Yanomama Indians of the Amazon rain forest, a people who have in the past been rather dehumanized by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomama: The Fierce People (Holt, 1968). Good began working with them in the mid-1970s, living in their communities, studying their lives, and eventually marrying a Yanomama. He does not avoid discussing the violence they are capable of wreaking upon one another, but he sets it within the broader context of love, kindness, and respect that permeates most of their interpersonal lives. This is a personal rather than scholarly account, but it provides such powerful counterpoint to the woefully unfair--but widely circulated--accounts of the Yanomama that it should be made available everywhere.-- Glenn Petersen, Baruch Coll., CUNY