false 19597340 235074 209851 0374299161 9780374299163 296 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172707594m/209851.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172707594s/209851.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209851.Fieldwork_A_Novel 3.63 908
When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one of Thailand’s English-language newspapers. One evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead—a suicide—in the Thai prison where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murder.

Motivated first by simple curiosity, then by deeper and more mysterious feelings, Mischa searches relentlessly to discover the details of Martiya’s crime. His search leads him to the origins of modern anthropology—and into the family history of Martiya’s victim, a brilliant young missionary whose grandparents left Oklahoma to preach the Word in the 1920s and never went back. Finally, Mischa’s obssession takes him into the world of the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life becomes a battleground for two competing, and utterly American, ways of looking at the world.

Vivid, passionate, funny, deeply researched, and page-turningly plotted, Fieldwork is a novel about fascination and taboo—scientific, religious, and sexual. It announces an assured and captivating new voice in American fiction.]]> 122855 3.61 996 329 2007 4 3 false Fri Apr 11 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Apr 06 16:58:40 -0700 2008 Sat Apr 12 18:42:01 -0700 2008 more...]]>