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The Ishi story is fascinating, and I second your recommendation, and also want to mention the famous documentary: Ishi, the last Yahi[1] It amazed me when I fo

• Jtsummers 6y ago
  It was a kind of weird closing of the circle for me. I'd seen the TV movie (jeez, 1992, my guess was way off for when that came out) as a young teenager (perhaps 13 or 14) and the story stuck with me, but I absolutely could never remember the name. Being pre-Internet (for me, we went online a few years later in our house) there was no easy way to find it again. Then I discovered Le Guin's writings after another TV movie (Lathe of Heaven (2002)) and started reading her fiction works. In 2014, I saw the Ishi books on my girlfriend's (at the time) bookshelf and realized that was the name I had been trying to recall for 20 years. Borrowed them, read them, then found out (because it's non-obvious, Kroeber and Le Guin are not the same name) when doing a bit more research that the author was her mother, and her father was the man who worked with Ishi. It made a lot of her writing (especially the Hainish cycle) more interesting to me as I realized it all possessed this anthropological bent in how it explored the worlds and their peoples.