"Even before its publication, Darkness in El Dorado became a Janusfaced text that in calling attention to methodological and ethical shortcomings of scientific research in the Amazon also brought attention to faults in its own production." "Tierneys harrowing account forces us to ask how personal and professional ethical questions are defined and connected. His merit is to have brought together a vast amount of information about Western anthropological and medical practices carried out among the Yanomami and to have situated these practices within the network of institutional connections that made them possible and the ideologies of science and history that have rendered them so popular." "While Tierneys focus is on individuals, his book locates them in two relevant contexts: the cold war and the Vietnam War, during which currents of evolutionary genetics, sociobiology, and cultural anthropology claiming that aggression plays a positive role in human evolution found broad support, and the Venezuelan petrostate culture of clientelism, which fostered a network of corrupt politicians and businessmen with interests in the Yanomami and their territory for reasons of profit and power."