Kate's Reviews > The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth

This book is pretty good, it's just not what the title suggested it to be. The author gives us a travel/adventure story combined with an interesting discussion of colonial British and Indian attitudes towards indigenous peoples. His description of these remote islands, how the native tribes are being systematically diminished and yet exploited for tourism, is fascinating and maddening. The author does a really good job at exposing these issues, yet admitting that he and you (as people probably fascinated by the "savagery" of these tribes) are part of the problem. But if you're looking for a comprehensive narrative about North Sentinel Island and the people who live there...this isn't quite it. There are some interesting interviews with anthropologists and locals who tell stories about the islanders, a timeline of outside contact with the islanders, and a constant rehashing of that story about the dumb missionary kid, but that's about it. The long story short is that there isn't enough known about these people to warrant an entire book. Which is fine, I just wish the author himself realized that before taking us through a million (fascinating, but jarring) tangents.