The Unconquered: Brazil's People of the Arrow

Scott Wallace

Scott Wallace is a writer, photographer, and broadcast journalist whose career covering national and international affairs spans the past three decades. He gained an early reputation for gutsy reporting from the battlefronts and barricades of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Panama in the 1980s, where he filed for CBS News Radio and a succession of print outlets that included the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsweek, the Independent of London, and Manchester/London Guardian.

Drawn to big stories involving conflict over land, resources, and ideology, Wallace brings the full range of his writing and reportorial talents and experience to bear in The Unconquered, his soon-to-released account of an epic journey into the deepest Amazon wilderness to track an uncontacted indigenous tribe. Part memoir, part travel tale, and part philosophical meditation, Wallace’s book brings to life a hidden world of darkness and danger, together with an unforgettable cast of Conradian characters. Two-time National Book award-winner Peter Matthiessen says The Unconquered is “exciting and authentic — a great pleasure to read.” Sebastian Junger calls it “riveting and brilliant — journalism at its very very best.” And this from The Wall Street: “a rousing adventure tale.”

Scott’s assignments have taken him from Afghanistan’s windswept Wakhan Corridor to the Alaskan Arctic, from the clandestine arms bazaars of the former Soviet Union to midnight raids on suspected fedayeen hideouts in the slums of Baghdad. He has authored two cover stories for National Geographic about the Amazon, and his writings about war, revolution, international organized crime, and vanishing cultures have appeared in Harper’s, Grand Street, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, the Village Voice, and Sports Afield, among many others.

His photography has been featured in Smithsonian, Outside, Details, Interview, Sports Afield, the New York Times, and Newsweek, and his television producing credits include CBS, CNN, Fox News, and National Geographic Channel.

He has three sons and lives in Washington, DC.