The process is clearly something difficult and painful for him, but Everett only refers to his loss of faith in brief asides. So be prepared for that, but I think it's all worth it for the profound commentary on human nature, and to get glimpses of how the Pirahã influenced Everett more than he ever influenced them. I think Everett’s point is that because the Piraha people have almost no conversation outside their present experiences, they have no need for abstract descriptors such as ‘red’ or ‘green’ – they will simply refer to the red or green thing that they are talking about. The SIL had great faith that the sacred words of the scriptures alone were all that was needed to illuminate the wicked souls of the heathens and inspire them to convert to the one true faith.

However, it's very difficult to accept that argument from someone who doesn't even really know if he speaks the language correctly. They live to a much younger age, have a real danger posed from jungle animals, and die of diseases that have routine cures in the US. The third section, which unfortunately only makes up a small fraction of the book, is about Everett's re-evaluation, and ultimately rejection, of his faith in god and other supernatural ideas. Everett states in his book that he as well as a series of psychologists completed experiments to prove that the Pirahas had no words for numbers in their culture. He told the shocking story of how one of the Piraha babies was sick and they felt that nothing else would help the baby, so they gave the baby alcohol to speed up death.It will take him some time to come to terms with the fact that “two cultures … could see reality so differently. Mornings among the Pirahãs, so many mornings, I picked up the faint smell of smoke drifting from their cook fires, and the warmth of the Brazilian sun on my face, its rays softened by my mosquito net. And I should also stress that this section is not an angry rant against faith -- quite the opposite. The Piraha language by itself is one of the simplest languages; without words for colors or numbers, they don’t have a future or past tense, or quantifiers. It is certainly easy to list of the things they don’t have: they don’t have advanced tools, they don’t have many material possessions, they don’t have the internet, they don’t have big houses, and the list goes on.

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is narrated by the author, who clearly isn’t a professional narrator, but he would be the only person able to do the job, as the book includes frequent quotations in the Pirahã language, which I doubt anyone else could pronounce. Everett said in the interview that he was so upset with them and still to this day, doesn’t understand why they thought that was okay when they could have tried more ways to save him. His wife and children accompany him, and bear up well under the pressure, though perhaps not so very well given that it’s a different wife to whom he dedicates the book in 2008. This is much less dry than it sounds, and is all cunningly tied into an equally fascinating story of Everett’s life with the Piraha and his loss of faith.Which is not to say that their lives could not be improved in some ways: their way of dealing with sick or dying children and mothers in childbirth seems to our eyes to be somewhere between hardhearted and barbaric.