” Tristes Tropiques” begins with the line `I hate travelling & explorers`, yet during his life Claude Levi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin & the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found `human society reduced to its most basic expression`. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of `primitive` man. ” Tristes Tropiques” is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty & a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal & cultural loss, & brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful & broad an impact.