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AMAZON HEAD-HUNTERS, written and inscribed by Lewis Cotlow. Stated first edition, Illustrated with maps and photos, Hardcover with dust jacket. Book Condition: Good. The text block and photographs are in near fine condition, with no marks, tears, or dog-ears. Tight binding. Not a library book or remainder. No bookplate or signature of previous owner. The pages and endpapers are age-tanned. The tan boards are in good condition with no bumping, but the blue cloth spine is worn at the bottom 1? and bumped at the top. The price-clipped dust jacket is in poor condition (complete but separated along a fold, with tears, chipping, and age-tanning). Inscription on the first free endpaper reads: To my friend Dr. Jan-Albert Goris. I hope you enjoy this account of my wanderings among the primitive tribes of remote Amazonia. With high esteem and best wishes. Lewis Catlow, 11/19/53. 8 ½ x 5 ¾, 245 pages, 16 ounces. Please note that with packaging this book will weigh over one pound, so additional postage will be necessary for any shipments outside the US. Please contact me before buying if you do not live in the US. XX [from the dust jacket flaps]: Why does a man cut off another man's head, shrink it to the size of his fist, and then dance around it? One would normally expect a professional explorer and anthropologist to seek out the answer to such a question?not a man whose main job is that of running a successful business in New York's financial district. But Lewis Cotlow, insurance man by vocation and explorer, photographer, and world traveler by avocation, wanted to know the answer. An insatiable curiosity about people and what makes them laugh, weep, love, and kill, had sent him traveling about the world from the time he was twenty-one years old. Finally it urged him to the headwaters of the Amazon, where a fiercely independent tribe of Indians still carries on its centuries-old religious rite of head-shrinking. Equipped only with his cameras and color films, a few provisions, and gifts for the Indians (among which eyebrow pencils were highly prized), Mr. Cotlow set out through the dense tropical jungle with a half-breed guide and a fervent hope that the warlike natives would not shoot first and make inquiries later, as was their not uncommon practice. Lewis Cotlow (1898-1987) always travels unarmed, knowing that in the jungle any hostile natives will have him under observation long before he can possibly see them, and that a lack of weapons is his best evidence of peaceful intent. ?When they have you completely at their mercy," he says, "the head-hunters can relax enough to become your friends," This book is the story of Cotlow's journeys and adventures in his quest to learn as much as he could about the Jivaro head-hunters and other primitive tribes of South America, and to make a film about their lives.
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