the writer being touched by his subjects, being himself altered by those gestures of imagination, mystery and dream imminent in the people and places he so passionately studies. It is this sense of excitement and spontaneity of learning, eloquently shared, that makes the book such a good read. In the end, Davis' curiosity is more vast than simple, as is his capacity to absorb knowledge. As for his horror of boredom, perhaps his fears are more profound. As he tells the story, one of Margaret Mead's greatest nightmares was that one day we would wake up, look around and find ourselves all to be the same, and, what's worse, in doing so we wouldn't even remember what we lost. This book is much more than an exciting travelogue, or a romance of far away places and exotic peoples. Davis' underlying theme is urgent and challenges the complacency of daily life in an industrial and technological society. In Davis' view, the survival of the world's indigenous cultures is crucial to our communal creativity and resourcefulness, if, as he says, those "imperatives driving the highest aspirations of our species were to be the power of faith, the reach of spiritual intuition, the philosophical generosity to recognize the varieties of religious longings." Indeed, if we are to know ourselves to be who we are. Anthropologist Margaret Mead defined a nightmare as waking up one day and not knowing what we've lost. Anthropologist Wade Davis applies this to the world's languages. Though spoken by