Patrick Tierney
Darkness in El Dorado
How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the AmazonA finalist for the 2000 National Book Award in Non-Fiction. What Guns, Germs, and Steel did for colonial history, this book does for present-day anthropology.
Darkness in El Dorado is an explosive account of how ruthless journalists, self-serving anthropologists, and obsessed scientists placed one of the Amazon basin's oldest tribes on the cusp of extinction. First coming to prominence in the 1960s, the "savage" Yanomami Indians were the subject of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon's multi-million-copy bestseller Yanomami: The Fierce People and many award-winning films. These exemplars of human ferocity, however, did not arrive at such dispositions naturally. Patrick Tierney describes how the Yanomami's internecine warfare was triggered by repeated visits of leading anthropologists from around the world as well as by the Atomic Energy Commission, which wished to use Yanomami blood in radiation studies in the mid-1960s. This is an epic, compelling work, sure to shake the very foundations of American anthropology.
Patrick Tierney spent ten years researching and writing Darkness in El Dorado. His first book, The Highest Altar, will be the subject of a National Geographic TV documentary in 2000.
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