
When We Sold God's Eye
Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon
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Narrated by:
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Alex Cuadros
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By:
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Alex Cuadros
About this listen
In this "remarkable" true story, an Amazonian tribe is forced to reconcile with Westerners entering their territory and running an illegal diamond mine (Douglas Preston).
Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita witnessed the first highway pierced through the century-old trees, and they lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new capitalist reality, discovering its wonders as well as its horrors. They forged an uneasy symbiosis with their white antagonists—until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre; an act of retribution that made headlines across the globe.
Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God's Eye is a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of a vital ecosystem threatened by the hunger for natural resources; of genocide and revenge. Most of all, it’s about a few startlingly clever individuals and their power to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.
Critic reviews
"A remarkable feat of research embedded in vivid and compelling prose, When We Sold God’s Eye unveils the story of the once-isolated Cinta Larga people, whose lives and culture are transformed—at the hands of Western prospectors and conflicting government regulations—within the incomprehensible speed of a single generation. 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."—Susan Southard, author of Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War
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