Rating: 
Summary: A Great Story With Many Different Layers!
Review: LIke many, I picked this book up from an interest in anthropology. Like most of those same people, when I finished it, it felt as if i'd ended a great novel. To be completely honest, there are a severely limited number of times I (a twenty-six year old male graduate student in politics) have read a book only to have tears roll down my cheeks. Seriously, this is a glorious story as well as a fascinating anthropological commentary.Here's the context: Ken Good was a graduate student under Napoleon Chagnon who was one of the first to do work with the Yanomamo indians. Chagnon wanted Good to do some research (field work) that might help supplement Chagnon's thesis that that Yanomamo are violent more by nature than culture. No matter the reasons, Good ends up not only abandoning Chagnon and his research, but finds the Yanomamo significantly less violent (by nature or culture) than Chagnon did. This may, in part, have been due to the fact that where Chagnon always remained the detached observer (his book is full of graphs, charts, and statistics), Good's got very personal (no stats here, for better or worse). ...Which brings us to the next layer of the story. Beyond being an anthropological perspective on the Yanomama, it is a fantastic - FANTASTIC! - love story. After a few years of living in the Yanomama community, good was offered a wife according to tradition. It took him a while to warm to it (and her even longer, given that he had strange habits like writing in notebooks and wearing 'foot coverings' Who would do such things?!). Their love blossomed, though, and the second half of the book is much about a host of difficulties: his struggle to 'hold on to her' when obligation took him out of the village for months at a time, the struggle to get a legal marriage to a woman who has no birth records, and later, how to get her out of the village with him. The only problem i had with the book has less to do with the book and more with its circumstances. Good comments that Chagnon, in painting the Yanomama to be 'fierce people' overexaggerated (rather than fabricated) their ferocity. My guess, after reading both books, is that Good did the same thing by possibly underexaggerating. Good, for instance, will speak of some of the heinous things that Yanomama do, speak of it as a ancillary side-note, and wrap it up in two sentences, only returning to the topic chapters down the road. Truth be told, I think the truth lies betwixt Chagnon's and Good's accounts and I can't fault either book, but when one reads the two together, one gets the impression that BOTH authors completely missed (or ignored) things that the other got. How else could such different accounts come to pass? For all that I strongly recommend this read both for education in anthropology and as one of the best love stories around.
Rating: 
Summary: An honest perspective--with whine and roses.
Review: This book is mixed. On the one hand, we obtain the perspective of a student of one of the more eminent anthropologists of the field, Napoleon Chagnon. He describes in detail the so-called Great Protein debate between Marvin Harris (who argues that competition for game leads to warfare) and his own mentor (who claims that abduction of women is the flashpoint for war), and, by measuring the weight of game brought into "his" village, concludes that Harris wins the debate in this instance. His attempt to explain why he is weighing all those porcupines to a people whose vocabulary contains no numbers exceeding "more than two" is hilarious. I have no problem with his sex and marriage with a locally defined adult woman--even if she was only 13 years at first contact. We have a rigid view of sex that would put him in the slammer if he did it in New Jersey or even in Caracas--but this was Yanomamo territory. I have no truck with the bluenoses who cry ethics--unless he raped or otherwise coerced her. If the attraction was mutual, then their relationship is neither your business nor mine. (And they tell us that anthropologists are not ethnocentric!) On the other hand, I do have a problem with all that whining and paranoia attending his falling out with Chagnon. What does he expect? Of course there is going to be friction. It may be that Chagnon is so rigid in his thinking that he tolerates no dissent--an anti-academic attitude if there ever was one, but what else is new? Tolerance of different opinions is the exception, not standard practice, in academia. If Good dissents from Massa Napoleon, he should prepare to take the consequences from the Stalins of academia. For the record, I think Chagnon's view is closer to the mark, inasmuch as Good never reports an actual battle arising between two bands meeting at a contested game site. Indeed, affirming the protein weight as expected in Harris's hypothesis, in and of itself alone, does not settle the issue.) All in all, not a bad book--if he cuts out all that self-pity.
Rating:
Summary: This is one of the only books that I've read from cover to c
Review: This is one of the most entertaining books that I've read from cover to cover throughout my college education. I've also been lucky enough to have Dr. Good as a professor for two classes. We used this book for both classes. In reading this book and hearing first hand of his life in the Amazon, has made me realize that the world is bigger and more diverse than I ever wondered. His marriage to Yarima shows the love that can happen to people being from anywhere in the world. Some of his colleagues at the University like to show their lack of intelligence by talking about this marriage to Yarima. If they had half the experience Dr. Good posses in the field they would realize that they are just jealous of being nobodies in his department.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting story from a distant land
Review: With Into the Heart, Good and Chanoff have created that all-too-rare phenomenon-- a book that can be equally enjoyed by the general reader and the academic specialist. A riveting account of Good's years with the Yanomami people of Venezuela and Brazil, it can be read as a rich ethnography, an "insider's view" of the scientific research process, an edge-of-your-seat travel yarn, or a rainforest version of "Romeo and Juliet." I first encountered it quite by chance in the trade-book section of a chain bookstore, where the word "Yanomami" on the cover caught my eye. In my graduate training as a cultural anthropologist, I had read descriptions of the Yanomami characterizing them as "the fierce people." jungle warriors whose obsession with violence and warfare alledgedly proved that human nature was innately nasty and brutish. So I was both astonished and pleased to read Good's nuanced descriptions of life in a Yanomami village, to find that this much-maligned group was composed of unique, complex individuals, some aggressive, some gentle, all impressively resourceful in adapting to their rainforest environment. I now use it as an auxiliary text in my introductory classes, and student response has been overwhelmingly positive. Good's discussion of his research brings to life the interplay of scientific theory and data in a dramatic and accessible way. At the same time, his sketches of daily life among the Yanomami transport the reader so effectively that one can almost smell the meat roasting on the campfires, hear the low murmur of voices punctuating the night, feel the rhythm of lives enjoyed in attunement with nature and kin. The Yanomami no longer seem like strangers in a strange land, but like neighbors-- people we feel we know. And then there's the love story that propels the narrative and provides suspense, the memoir of gradually flowering trust, tenderness, and commitment between Ken and Yarima, the Yanomamo woman who would become his wife and the mother of their three children. The emotional richness of their struggle to preserve love in the face of immense cultural barriers is especially appealing to college-age readers, and probably explains why more than one undergraduate has confessed that "Ken Good's book was the only one I read cover-to-cover this semester-- I just had to find out what happened!" A rare human document that can be enjoyed on many levels, this unique story will find its way "into the heart" of any reader who enters its rainforest world-- and will not be soon forgotten.
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