FIELDWORK

William Dufris delivers a sterling performance of this novel of anthropologists and missionaries who are competing with each other for influence over the hill tribes of northern Thailand. It begins with a fictional version of the author, also named Mischa, stumbling across the story of Martiya, a Berkeley-trained anthropologist who committed suicide in a Thai prison, where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murdering a missionary. Then things get complicated. Dufris manages a host of regional American accents and, even more remarkably, offers believable Thais speaking English. With pacing and changes of tone, his sensitive reading brings the listener inside the three radically different cultures of Thai hill tribes, evangelical Christian Americans, and academic anthropologists. R.E.K. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/ SEP 07]