Books: Under the Blue Derby

AFFABLE SAVAGES (285 pp.)—Francis Huxley—Viking ($4.75).

To be hantan (hard) or membek (soft) —that is the question every Hamlet of Brazil's Urubu Indians must try to answer. Hantan men spend their lives out hunting in the jungle along the Gurupi River; membek fellows stay at home with the girls, which makes them even membeker. The girls like their lovers to be tough, but only because it's more fun tempting them to become membek. And anyone who succumbs to such temptation is liable to be turned into a toad after death. It's all a big problem, the Urubus assured Anthropologist Francis Huxley, who...