The Last Island is an exploration of a remote island's struggle against the forces of modern imperialism and technology. Goodheart's narrative begins with a personal obsession and spirals outward into a profound examination of the human condition and the value of contact.
North Sentinel Island is a tiny speck of land in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a reclusive tribe that has almost no contact with modernity. Located on the fringes of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, it caught the attention of the world in 2018, when a young, Bible- clutching American missionary tried to visit the island and was killed by islanders.
While not the only reclusive tribe to survive into the twenty-first century, the Sentinelese are the only ones to have an island wholly their own and have been described by Survival International as 'the most isolated people in the world'.
The Andaman islands were home to many such isolated tribes until the establishment of a British penal colony in the mid-nineteenth century. The Sentinelese, stubbornly resistant to outsiders, remained and continue to remain-independent.
Part travelogue, part narrative history, it is based on historian Adam Goodheart's two expeditions, more than twenty years apart, to the archipelago.
The book is an adventure and a thoughtful meditation on a small tribe's resilience in the face of globalized modernity. Echoing with historical insights and contemporary relevance, The Last Island is a read that bridges past and present with depth.
š What does it mean to truly connect?
š️ Adam Goodheart's The Last Island is a tale of a small tribe's fight against modern imperialism.
What's your favorite book about cultural preservation?
Non - fiction
Publisher - Juggernaut
Price - Rs 699
Pages - 236
ADAM GOODHEART is a historian, travel writer, essayist, journalist, and author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Geographic, and The American Scholar. Goodheart is the director of Washington College's Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
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