So powerful . . . Cuadros, an American reporter who spent years living and working in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese, found the perfect man and incident to tell this achingly tragic story. And unlike so many others, he tells it from the point of view of the Indigenous people themselves, at a scale small enough to hold in your hand

At the heart of Cuadros’s lush, textured epic, layered with emotions and motivations both foul and fair, is an indictment of colonization itself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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