© Sun-Times News GroupDaniel Everett (right) first joined up with the tribe in 1977.
The mission assigned to Daniel Everett after he graduated from Chicago's Moody Bible Institute was to change the lives of members of a tiny tribe in the Amazonian rain forest.
It was, however, Everett who was changed.
Everett, along with his wife and three children, were met in the rain forest by the Piraha people of central Brazil -- a primitive culture which has no words for numbers or colors and no concept of war or personal property. They live in the present.
For a missionary like Everett, then 26, that last part proved a stumbling block as he tried to find the language to talk about Jesus and an afterlife to people who never talk about the past nor the future.
In the end, Everett, now a linguistics professor at Illinois State University, abandoned his own religious faith, a tale he tells in his new book,
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.