Everything Biscuits & When We Sold God's Eye
An excellent non-fiction book set in Brazil, and a rich, seedy biscuit
I love non-fiction. I love getting to learn about stories, worlds, and people I would never encounter in my daily life. Nothing is better than becoming immersed in a story so bizarre you couldn’t make it up. My favourite sub-genre is adventure non-fiction—books like The Adventurer’s Son, Land of Lost Borders, Wavewalker, and Pure Land. To add to my list of top adventure books is this issue’s feature: When We Sold God’s Eye.
Good Book: When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon by Alex Cuadros (2024)
When We Sold God’s Eye In a Nutshell
This fantastic narrative non-fiction book is about the Cinta Larga, an Indigenous tribe deep in the Amazon, near the border with Bolivia. After the first highway was constructed through Cinta Larga territory in the 1960s, white settlers began appearing in increasing numbers. They were drawn to the area’s rich natural resources, eventually extracting a range of materials from the earth, from centuries-old hardwood trees to diamonds. In varying ways, the Cinta Larga both participated in and resisted the changes brought by outsiders over the decades. Author Cuadros tells the story through Pio, Maria, and Oita, three Cinta Larga who were kids when settlers first arrived, and have experienced the drastic transformation of their people and way of life.
When We Sold God’s Eye in Three Words
Detailed, shocking, illuminating
What I liked about When We Sold God’s Eye
Reads like a novel
By filtering much of the story through Pio, Maria, and Oita, this book reads like a novel in many ways. I got the sense while reading that Cuadros must have developed very trusting relationships with these three individuals as he was able to learn such detailed things about their lives. I became really attached to them, and I wanted to know how they were going to handle each wild circumstance.
Never knew where the story was going
It’s so interesting to read about a real-world topic you know nothing about, especially in such a suspenseful book. I never knew what twist or shocking development was going to take place in this contested corner of the Amazon. The greed that forever changed the Cinta Larga’s homeland made people do brutal and terrible things, ones I could never quite anticipate.
Research
While reading this book, I often found myself thinking with wonder at how many interviews and how much research Cuadros must have done to do to tell the story. In addition to the intimate details of Pio, Maria, and Oita’s lives, this books also packs in plenty of fascinating information about resource extraction, Brazil’s relationship with its Indigenous peoples, and early contact with settlers including the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition of 1914. This book made me want to learn a lot more about the Amazon and the groups that have inhabited it for centuries.
Good Bread: Everything Cream Cheese Biscuits
Why this bread for this book?
When reading Deb Perelman’s description for this recipe in her cookbook Smitten Kitchen Everyday, I liked how she described combining the butter, flour, and cream cheese together until it formed a “rubbly” dough. So much of the conflict and tension over resources in the Cinta Larga territory swirls around diamonds and gold. For years, both outsiders and some Cinta Larga tried their luck at digging up the land and sifting through it in an attempt to unearth some of the precious metals. I thought the rubble-like nature of the dough connected to the land being disrupted in this way.
Watch me bake these biscuits below!
Recipe
This recipe, as mentioned above, is from Smitten Kitchen Everyday. You can view a digital version here. It’s perfect. It takes about a half hour to make these delicious morsels. They are great for a day when you want a nice bread-y something but don’t have the energy or ambition for anything very involved. I baked these after a day of tree-skiing when I was feeling lazy but also very interested in some carbs, and they made my house smell like a bagel shop. Win.
Looking forward:
Book I’m looking forward to reading: Seven by Farzana Doctor
Music I’m looking forward to listening to: Glory by Perfume Genius
Bread I’m looking forward to baking: Chilli crisp sourdough
Thank you for reading! If you liked this issue, forward along to a friend. If you hated it, please forward along to an enemy.