this book is somewhere halfway between memoir and linguistic/anthropological study, similar to tristes tropiques. it’s the author’s 30-year experience studying/living with a secluded amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe called the pirahã, which are notable because it seems like they were placed on the earth exclusively to falsify every theory of universal human cultural and linguistic features that anthropologists and linguists have ever come up with. probably the closest we can come to simulating an encounter with aliens. it’s astonishing how everett was able to come in and learn pirahã under those conditions, their language is an isolate with no surviving relatives and grammatical structures found in no other languages, even the most knowledgable pirahã knew no more than a handful of words in another language (portugese), and of course there was the vast cultural gap that had to be bridged as well.