What "Guns, Germs, and Steel" did for colonial history, this book will do for modern anthropology, telling the explosive story of how ruthless journalists, self-serving anthropologists, and obsessed scientists placed the Yanomami, one of the Amazon basin's oldest tribes, on the cusp of extinction. A "New York Times" Notable Book. of photos.

Thought to be the last "virgin" people, the Yanomami were considered the most savage and war-like tribe on earth, as well as one of the most remote, secreted in the jungles and highlands of the Venezuelan and Brazilian rainforest. Preeminent anthropologists like Napoleon Chagnon and Jacques Lizot founded their careers in the 1960s by "discovering" the Yanomami's ferocious warfare and sexual competition. Their research is now examined in painstaking detail by Patrick Tierney, whose book has prompted the American Anthropological Association to launch a major investigation into the charges, and has ignited the academic world like no other book in recent years. The most important book on anthropology in decades, Darkness in El Dorado will be a work to be reckoned with by a new generation of students the world over.