Kenneth Good Knihy

Faces of the Rainforest , Valdir Cruz’s first monograph, is a prophetic portrait of a people on the brink of extinction. The Yanomami , native to Venezuela and Brazil, are believed to be descendants of those who migrated over the Bering Strait some twenty centuries ago, and have been residents of the Amazon for the past 15,000 years. Though they are one of the last remaining societies untouched by modernization, interference from outsiders has incontestably altered the fragile future of the Yanomami , as documented in Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney. Like Edward S. Curtis’ photographs before him, Cruz’s haunting images are made all the more hallucinatory by the knowledge that this ancient culture is about to disappear off the face of the earth.

This is an absorbing, thrilling account of an anthropologist's foray into the heart of the Amazon, where for 12 years he lived among the Yanomama, learned their language, fell in love with one of their women, then found himself in a harrowing life-and-death struggle to keep from losing her.