Books I've Read

A fascinating account of Everett's time living among the Pirahã people of the Amazon rainforest. The book challenges fundamental assumptions about language, culture, and human cognition. Everett's observations about the Pirahã language—which lacks numbers, colors, and recursion—forced him to reconsider Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. Beyond linguistics, it's a deeply human story about cultural immersion, the limits of Western thought, and what we can learn from radically different ways of being.