First and foremost I would like to thank my good friends and family who shared their thoughts and conversations about this topic and read various drafts of this book. Those people include Rob Leaver, Melik Keylan, Austin Dacey, Daniela Petrova, Alan Huffman, Josh Waitzkin, Brendan O’Byrne, and my mother, Ellen. In addition, psychologist Hector Garcia offered me incredibly valuable advice about some of the scientific aspects of this book. And Barbara Hammond provided a continual source of encouragement, wisdom, and advice that saved me from many blunders and dead ends.
I am also indebted to my agent, Stuart Krichevsky; my editor, Sean Desmond; and my publicists, Cathy Saypol and Brian McLendon. I would also like to thank Deb Futter and Jamie Raab at Grand Central, as well as Paul Samuelson, who handled the day-to-day details of the publicity effort. Mari Okuda also did another amazing job as senior production editor on the manuscript, and I am very grateful to her for her great skill with the English language. The book appeared in early form in Vanity Fair magazine, and I am grateful to Graydon Carter and Doug Stumpf for trusting my instincts on this topic. I would have been completely lost without the heroic efforts of my researcher, Rachael Hip-Flores, who managed to track down every bizarre and arcane request that I threw at her.
My father passed away in 2012. Many of the ideas in this book were formed during a lifetime of conversations with him about the complicated blessings of “civilization.” The opposing point of view was brought into focus by my friend and surrogate uncle, Ellis Settle, who pointed out that white captives of the American Indians often did not want to be repatriated to colonial society. That idea stayed in my mind for thirty years, until it reappeared as a possible explanation for why so many soldiers that I knew missed the war they’d fought in. The two impulses seemed roughly analogous, and I decided to pursue that idea as far as I could. This book is the result.