A mix of anthropological text and memoir, The Other Side of Eden takes the reader into radical geographical and intellectual terrain. Drawing on his extensive experience living amongst “hunter-gatherer” societies – mainly in the Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic – anthropologist Hugh Brody challenges the stereotypes and myths that still surround the world’s hunting peoples.

Brody begins, appropriately enough, with the first chapters of Genesis. Adam and Eve, exiled from the Garden of Eden and its unending bounty, are forced to work the land, in essence becoming the first farmers. Brody finds in this story, and the generations of Adam, the archetypal myths of the world’s farming peoples: forever toiling to make the soil yield to their efforts, forever bidding goodbye to offspring who must search for more fertile land to raise their own children on.

Juxtaposed against this supposedly “universal” story, Brody documents the parallel history of hunter-gatherer cultures. Working in harmony with the land and raising their children within geographically defined territories for millennia, hunting societies are shown to be anything but the rootless, half-starved nomads of popular and anthropological wisdom.

In a lesser writer’s hands, The Other Side of Eden could have become another variation on the theme of the noble savage, that half-naked innocent that has haunted the Western imagination for centuries. But Brody’s vivid portraits of the various hunters, political leaders, and families he lived and worked with dispells any notion that such people live a life of moral and intellectual simplicity. He also does not gloss over the daily hardships of a life lived close to the land, nor shy away from the phenomenon of inter-cultural warfare that occasionally erupted along the borderlines of communally held land.

What makes The Other Side of Eden a good read, though, is Brody’s considerable skill as a storyteller and his ability to synthesize and explain to the general reader concepts from such far-ranging fields as theology, anthropology, and linguistics.