Journalist Adam Goodheart on the Last Tribes of the Sentinel Islands
St. Louis County Library Foundation and the JCC of St. Louis are pleased to host an SLCL Authors @ the J event with journalist Adam Goodheart, author of “The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth.”
The event will take place on Wednesday, January 17 at 7:00 p.m. at the JCC’s Staenberg Family Center – Mirowitz Performing Arts Center, 2 Millstone Campus Drive, St. Louis, MO 63146.
The program is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event from Left Bank Books
In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called “Satan’s last stronghold,” a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our time: an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology.
Twenty years before the American missionary’s ill-fated visit, a young American historian and journalist named Adam Goodheart also traveled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time.
Now, Goodheart—a bestselling historian—has returned to the Andamans. “The Last Island” is a work of history as well as travel, a journey in time as well as place. It tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel’s mystery through the centuries, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes’ encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island’s shores.
“The Last Island” is a beautifully written meditation on the end of the Age of Discovery at the start of a new millennium. It is a book that will fascinate any reader interested in the limits—and dangers—of our modern, global society and its emphasis on ceaseless, unbroken connection.
Adam Goodheart is a historian, essayist, journalist, and bestselling 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.
Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.