Joshua A. Bell, Alison K. Brown, and Robert J. Gordon, eds., Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology, and Popular Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Scholarly Press, 2013. 276 pp.I want to begin my review of Bell, Brown, and Gordon's Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology, and Popular Culture by drawing out an observation made by John Homiak in his evocative Foreword to text. Homiak reminds us that the of 'first contact' has been incredibly resilient (xi). He goes on to mention a recent CBS broadcast in which an anthropologist and a journalist discuss indigenous groups in Brazil. Speaking over an aerial shot taken from a helicopter as they looked down upon people in an Amazonian village, journalist informed his viewers that 'there are sixty-eight uncontacted tribes still believed to be in Brazil' (xi). I was immediately struck by similarity to another recent version of this that also aired on television. In this case, however, familiar paradigm of bearded, somewhat disheveled, white, male anthropologist, narrating into a documentary camera while hum of aircraftengines forces his voice into a kind of continual, monotonous shout, was adopted by advertisers selling advantages of Xfinity On Demand over satellite dish technology to receive television and other media. In this particular spot, anthropologist flies over a dense forest and circles a clearing in which a strange isolated bit of suburbia-complete with minivans and soccer moms-exists. While looking down with a mixture of pity and fascination, anthropologist marvels at these primitive people's complete lack of awareness that modern technology of Xfinity On Demand even exists. Meanwhile, sonorous tones of a television documentary voice-over inform us that the world was recently shocked to discover an isolated group of people, totally cut offfrom latest advances in technology. The comic use of first contact (and disappearing tribe trope) in this commercial play easily upon a general awareness that such moments are, or at least were, a part of anthropological sciences and age of discovery. But more than this, ad- as well as Homiak's example taken from an actual documentary-draws upon a range of themes that are wonderfully articulated in Bell et al. volume. These themes include, for example, idea that first contact necessarily implies primitiveness of those contacted; superiority (via technology) of those doing contacting or discovering; moral advancement of modern society, etc. The book also highlights idea that models for visual representations under discussion here were already firmly established in popular literature produced throughout colonial period. Indeed, development of any trope in popular representation of sciences seems to be result of dissemination of widespread practices that yield both a certain kind of knowledge production and a kind of gloss of scientific methodology that seeps into popular culture. This, in and of itself, reproduces a kind of truth-effect of way science works and kinds of things we can know from it.The book is divided into 13 chapters in addition to foreword mentioned above and an afterword by Henrika Kucklick. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, but center around relationship between anthropology and related sciences (the naturalist, botanist, etc.), popular culture and technology, and broader issues of imperialism/ colonialism and positioning of Western identity in relation to perceived exemplars of non-Western world. These relationships bear out in a variety of fascinating ways. On one hand, Daniel Bradburd's essay before Kong: 'Natives' in Films of Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack compares classic ethnographic film Grass to Hollywood blockbuster King Kong-both made by Merian Cooper and both representing non-Western natives. …