José Carlos Amaringo Chico, known to his people, the Ashaninka, as Tasorentsi, which roughly translates to “world transformer,” shaped the course of the history of the central Peruvian jungle (known as the central montaña) from the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth century. In this book, anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero weaves together the life of Tasorentsi with the lives of several indigenous groups including Tasorentsi's own Ashaninka as well as the Yine, Shipibo-Conibo, and Yenesha peoples. Although the book revolves around a 1915 uprising when native peoples of the central montaña expelled for several years the white and mestizo landholders who had abused and enslaved them, the book narrates the long arch of the “world transformer” Tasorentsi's long life (1875–1958), as well as the transformation of the central montaña through the booms and busts of the period. Santos-Granero seeks to discover why the uprising, and indeed Tasorentsi's life, have largely been ignored in both the historiography of the region and the oral tradition of its native peoples.

The book opens with a meeting between Tasorentsi and Mieczysław Lepecki, a Polish army captain. Much of Santos-Granero's descriptions of Tasorentsi come from Lepecki. By the time of the meeting, 13 years had passed since the uprising, and Tasorentsi was already a well-known shaman chief or pinkatsari. From this point, the book works backwards in time. On September 5, 1915, some 16 Ashaninka pinkatsaris aided by Conibo and Yine warriors simultaneously attacked several targets along the upper Ucayali River. Santos-Granero argues that this was not just a random outpouring of rage but a coordinated attack. The targets were not random either, he contends. They were estates from which whites and mestizos had enslaved and forced local native people to collect rubber. When rubber boomed during the late nineteenth century, the region became a center of production and forced labor. Just before the uprising, competition from Southeast Asia created a precipitous drop in the price of rubber, putting more pressure on an already impoverished region and leading to violence. Tasorentsi was not only at the center of the uprising as one of the 16 pinkatasris, but, as Santos-Granero reveals, he was also intimately aware of the difficulties of the enslaved people: he had been held in bondage himself as a child, and as a young man he became a slaver.

The second half of the book focuses on Tasorentsi's role as a “people-gatherer.” Shortly after the 1915 uprising, Seventh Day Adventists led by Ferdinand Stahl, a German American missionary entered the region. Adventism appealed to many in the central montaña due to its belief that the immediate return of Jesus Christ would transform the world. These ideas were not only in line with preexisting indigenous religious traditions, but the promise of sudden change also appealed to the oppressed and enslaved indigenous residents. Tasorentsi became one of its principle advocates, even though he himself was never baptized, as he could not abandon the ayahuasca-fueled visions from which his shamanic power derived. It was ultimately his connection with the Adventists that caused Tasorentsi's role as an indigenous leader to be erased from the historical record, as Catholic missionaries wrote most of the region's histories. Furthermore, the failure of the 1915 uprising to permanently remove the white/mestizo elite led to him being largely forgotten in the oral traditions of his own people.

This is a superbly researched book. Santos-Granero uses techniques borrowed from all corners of the disciplines of history and anthropology, from careful historical research to ethnomusicology. If the book has a drawback, it is the organization. Although putting historical studies in chronological order is not necessary, there does not seem to be a clear justification of the order of the events covered in the book. The author almost omnisciently moves back in forth through history in ways that can sometimes confuse the reader.