An innovative contribution to anthropology's interest in how identity is created and defined, this book uses two forms of ethnographic writing to explore the historical and social identity of a village on the banks of the Amazon River. He intersperses his analytical chapters with narrative sections that describe what the people do and how they do it. He thus moves beyond notions of identity that define themselves in collective, ethnic, or class terms by focusing on people's practical engagement with their environment.

The Southpaw is a story about coming of age in America by way of the baseball diamond. Lefthander Henry Wiggen, six feet three, a hundred ninety-five pounds, and the greatest pitcher going, grows to manhood in a right-handed world. From his small-town beginnings to the top of the game, Henry finds out how hard it is to please his coach, his girl, and the sports page and himself, too all at once. Written in Henry s own words, this exuberant, funny novel follows his eccentric course from bush league to the World Series. Although Mark Harris loves and writes tellingly about the pleasures...

Henry Wiggen, hero of The Southpaw and the best-known fictional baseball player in America, is back again, throwing a baseball "with his arm and his brain and his memory and his bluff for the sake of his pocket and his family." More than a novel about baseball, Bang the Drum Slowly is about the friendship and the lives of a group of men as they each learn that a teammate is dying of cancer. Bang the Drum Slowly was chosen as one of the top one hundred sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated and appears on numerous other lists of best baseball fiction....