Tristes Tropiques

''One of the great books of our century . . . It speaks with a human voice'' Susan Sontag

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line ''I hate travelling and explorers'', yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found ''human society reduced to its most basic expression''. His account of the people he enc...