When We Sold God's Eye

Cuadros, a veteran journalist of South American political economy, 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 . . . Imagine Killers of the Flower Moon but set in Brazil

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To the shelf of anthropological classics that includes Gregory Bateson's Naven, Levi Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, we can now add Alex Cuadros's 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

SONTAG

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. This is the type of deeply reported and carefully written book that the world needs more of

Gossamer

An essential story, built on deep and empathetic reportage. A hugely impressive piece of work

MAURICE AND MARALYN

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

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

Penetrating and wise; this book lit up a part of life that I'd known nothing about

A FLAT PLACE

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

THE END OF THE MYTH and FORDLANDIA

Cuadros's narrative, based on six years of interviews, is laid out unsentimentally . . . He 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

ArtReview

Cuadros, a veteran journalist of South American political economy, 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

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Importantly, When We Sold God's Eye (the title's 'we' is a telling choice, with 'God's Eye' referring to a diamond so large it resembled something otherworldly) does not portray the Cinta Larga as mere bystanders in their own disarray . . . The mosaic result complicates the "childlike" guilelessness that white society ascribed to the nation's Indigenous people in order to enable dispossession - and renders the incessant greed of modern capitalism the true savage of the story

The Nation

In the annals of destruction of the world's wildernesses and their indigenous peoples, WHEN WE SOLD GOD'S EYE deserves widespread attention, and seems destined to become a modern classic of literary nonfiction

CHE: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE

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

THE END OF NATURE

Alex 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

THE CONQUEST OF THE INCAS

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 remarkable literary achievement

THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD

A remarkable feat of research embedded in vivid and compelling prose . . . Bursting with wild, chaotic clashes of human values and exposing profound greed, corruption, violence, courage, survival, and the everyday contradictions within us all, WHEN WE SOLD GOD'S EYE offers us new levels of understanding of Western society's relationship to our earth and to cultures vastly different from our own. A must read, simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-filling

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