I found Mukerjee’s anthropological memoir describing the current life of the people of the Andaman Islands to be extremely gripping. Known for centuries in the outside world as the most “primitive” humans in existence, so primal in their lifestyle that they had not even mastered fire, they were often looked upon as little better than animals. Mukerjee cites and quotes myriad period documents which describe the interplay between the outsiders who took control of the Andaman Islands, first the British, then the Indians, up to current attempts to bring the last of the stone age tribes fully into contemporary Indian society. I feel that Mukerjee does a wonderful job describing a culture that is nearly unknown and showing that currently, the last remaining Andaman Islanders untouched by foreign influences are slowly being integrated in modern culture whether they want it or not, representing the last confrontation between a powerful colonial culture and one left unchanged, perhaps being the one we can do something about.