Please join Dart Society members on Thursday, Nov. 3, at 7:30 p.m. to hear Scott Wallace’s presentation at National Geographic!

“The Unconquered,” Scott Wallace’s new book about an expedition to find one of the last uncontacted tribes deep in the Amazon, showcases Scott’s ability to report from the inside out. Released this week by Crown, the 2004 Ochberg Fellow’s book was written up in TIME as a recommended read this fall and w as endorsed by environmental groups Amazon Watch and Greenpeace as a must-read for their supporters.

In search of the Flecheiros, or Arrow People — the tribe is named for its deadly, poison-tipped projectiles — the 34-person, three-month expedition was led by Sydney Possuelo, the head of Brazil’s Department of Isolated Indians. Possuelo had sought to gather information to protect the tribe. He would find the tribe without contacting them — get in and get out.

I asked Scott what he thought about professional distance both as a journalist and as part of the expedition:

“In fact the entire expedition was fair game to write about, as far as I was concerned. Everything and everyone. It couldn’t have been any other way. I was after the experience. Naturally, I was focused on the assignment for National Geographic, which was to tell the story of Sydney Possuelo, the expedition leader and my main character. For that reason, I didn’t delve too far into the past lives of the other men on the expedition. But their characters came to light and to life in how they responded to the stresses of the expedition — the dangers, the constant gloom of the closed-in forest, the deprivation, the rivalries.

“And I was very much a part of the whole scene too. There was no escaping that fact. So my thoughts, my awareness of my weaknesses and shortcomings, my yearnings and doubts, they were very much a part of what I was keeping track of. If you were to look at my notebooks from the journey, you’d see they’re a kind of hybrid of reporter’s field notes and a personal diary. The uncontacted Indians whose land we journeyed through were really a kind of character too, the great invisible presence against which everything else was lived and measured.”

Scott’s book tour schedule is here.