Euphoria by Lily King

" Euphoria is a meticulously researched homage to Mead's restless mind and a considered portrait of Western anthropology in its primitivist heyday. It's also a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace--a love triangle in extremis...

The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic...and King's signal achievement may be to have created satisfying drama out of a quest for interpretive insight...King is brilliant on the moral contradictions that propelled anthropological encounters with remote tribes...In King's exquisite book, desire--for knowledge, fame, another person--is only fleetingly rewarded."--Emily Eakin, New York Times Book Review