Author Description

This is an absorbing, thrilling account of an American anthropologist’s foray into the heart of the Amazon, where for twelve years he lived among the Yanomama, learned their language, was accepted into their world, fell in love with one of their women, then found himself in a harrowing life-and- death struggle to keep from losing her. When Ken Good first traveled down the Orinoco to the Amazon rain forest, he was a student of Napoleon Chagnon, the scholar who first introduced the world to those he called “the fierce people,” a Stone Age tribe who lived on hallucinogenic drugs and reveled in killing. The Yanomama were known as nomads who trekked through the forest in a perpetual hunt to satisfy their hunger; they were characterized as brutal and barbaric, proof that mankind in its natural state is anything but noble. INTO THE HEART is Good’s own eye-opening observations of the Yanomama, a description of a people so intense and vibrant that their world comes alive on the page. Good came to know them intimately: living as they lived, hanging his hammock alongside theirs, and chronicling their ways as completely as any outsider ever has. He tells us about the Yanomania’s methods of survival in a hard jungle, their coming-of-age rites, courting habits, hunting, warring, and drug rituals. They called him shori, brother-in- law, and in time the tribe elder advised him to do what every other Yanomama man his age should do - become betrothed to one of the tribe’s young girls. Her name was Yarima. As the years passed and she entered womanhood, she and Good fell deeply in love. INTO THE HEART is the story of that extraordinary marriage across cultures - of the times Good would be called away from the Amazon only to lose her to the jungle; of his desperate searches to find her and reclaim her as his wife. When Good understood that he and Yarima could never be separated again, he brought her out of the Amazon. But Yarima might as well have been from another planet for all her knowledge of her husband’s world. She had never seen flat, uncleared land, much less land with houses and cars. She had never worn clothes or walked in shoes. It is this moving love story that distinguishes Ken Good’s narrative from any other work on a primitive culture. Sure to rank with the most exciting books in its genre, INTO THE HEART is an unforgettable account of an extraordinary journey. BOOK JACKET