[citation needed] In 1982 Florinda Donner published a book, Shabono: A Visit to a Remote and Magical World in the South American Rain Forest, a narrative of living among the Yanomami Indians in the Venezuelan Amazon rainforest.
Particularly she criticized Donner for having plagiarized the biographical account of the Brazilian woman Helena Valero, who grew up as a captive among the Yanomami, without acknowledging having borrowed large parts of her life story.
Another critical review, by Dr. Debra Picchi, argues that the book was invalid as social science because of the author's autobiographical focus on her personal development and experience, rather than on describing the Yanomami people.
[3] One critic suspected that Donner had worked from the many ethnographic movies about the Yanomami and argued that in that case her book could be considered an interpretive study of the visual documentary data.
Eventually her former doctoral committee at UCLA published a letter in the Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, in which they expressed their disbelief in Donner's account, stating that she was present in Los Angeles during the period in which she supposedly lived among the Yanomami.