At Play in the Fields of the Lord

I read this book twice, in 1989 in Africa and in 1996 in Brazil, then I spent five years among the Yanomami Indians and was able to experience many of the things described in the story. I recently listened to the audiobook version and found it moving, fascinating and thought-provoking. Anthony Heald......more

My favorite book ever, at least so far as I recall. Protestant missionaries, Catholic missionaries, and a Lakota con-man turned his own sort of missionary in the Amazon jungle. Everyone's flawed, everyone has a plan to save the Natives, and everyone loses their minds a bit. The most likeable charact......more

What an exuberant mess of a book! It galloped forward. So much happened. I mean, there is a sheer overwhelming flood of happenings in his book, assaulting the reader almost, at the pace of The Perils of Pauline, a series of "and-then, and then, and-then's"... I loved that something so well written a......more

I realize this is an amazing piece of literature, but every time I pick it up, my heart breaks again. That is the mark of a brilliant author, but I just can't bear to keep feeling like this! Prepare yourself, if you embark on this journey, for a descent into the worst outcomes for the evil and even t......more

In the Heart of a Different Darkness My only previous encounter with the late Peter Matthiessen was his final novel, In Paradise, which impressed me immensely. So I went back almost fifty years to this novel of 1965, and was thrilled to see many of the same themes, yet treated in a strikingly differe......more