There are good reasons why this is the first English-language Lévi-Strauss biography. Mr. Wilcken argues that his subject’s texts have always been difficult to translate into English, not only because of their verbal nuances but also because of the very nature of Lévi-Strauss’s reasoning. For instance: “It is in the last resort immaterial whether in this book the thought processes of the South American Indians take place through the medium of my thought, or whether mine take shape through the medium of theirs,” he once wrote, offering the verbal equivalent of a Gallic shrug. Mr. Wilcken notes that Anglo-Americans with similar ideas would not be likely to express them that way.

The book offers clear, analytical descriptions of the basic tenets for which Lévi-Strauss is known. It explains how, as an anthropologist, he arrived among some Indians, like the Kaingang, too late to do the real fieldwork he intended (“All that was left was the cultural gray water, a depressing mix of tradition and modernity, each corrupted by the other,” Mr. Wilcken writes), and would have to travel deeper into the Amazon region to find more authentic subjects (the Nambikwara, the Tupi-Kawahib).

But the value of his field research would later be questioned. What Lévi-Strauss really came away with, especially after his initial exposure to structural linguistics through the ideas of notable figures like Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, were “the tools with which to float free from the morass of descriptive data and observe the patterns that cut across continents and cultures,” identifying the motifs and structures that struck him as universal.