Reading Borneo
My obsession with Tom Harrisson continues. This year I re-read for the 4th or 5th time, Tom Harrisson: the Most Offending Soul Alive. I also re-watched the BBC show about him. The author of this fabulous biography, Judith Heimann, also wrote,
The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II
by Judith M. Heimann
And if that was not enough, 2021 saw the publication at long last of Semut: The Untold Story of a Secret Australian Operation in WWII Borneo
by Christine Helliwell
Helliwell is an Australian historian and I think this was the most important WWII history to come out in the past few years.
In 2020, I enjoyed re-reading Gavin Young's, In Search of Conrad, Eric Hansen’s travel classic, Stranger in the Forest and Into the Heart of Borneo, which is maybe my favorite of them all. I also re-visited Lorne and Lawrence Blair's Ring of Fire films. I met Lorne Blair in Ubud not long before his tragic death. This walk down imaginary memory lane led me to discover a writer, I had never heard of before: Carl Hoffman (who wrote the best seller, Savage Harvest and his new double biography called The Last Wild Men of Borneo about Bruno Manser and American tribal art dealer Michael Palmieri. He is a fantastic writer and those books really were riveting!
I also picked up The Wasting of Borneo, by Alex Shoumatoff. I am a long time fan of his work and this book was very sad...
Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe (New York Times Magazine)
The Lungs of the Earth (Spiegel Online)
Note 1:
I mentioned above that Hoffman’s The Last Wild Men of Borneo is a double biography. The other subject of Hoffman’s book, tribal art dealer and collector Michael Palmieri, is in many ways a mirror image of Bruno Manser. In a story that reads more like a Hollywood movie, we follow Palmieri from his surfing days in LA deep into the rainforest of Borneo; where he has fled after dodging the draft and traveling overland from Paris to Goa, by way of Kabul. In Indonesia, he buys a longboat and—you guessed it—heads upriver to buy artifacts. This is where Hoffman’s book really shines. Because the rainforest is not just being threatened by loggers and palm oil corporations, as it turns out the cultural treasures of the Dayak are being plundered as well. In what seems to be a typical story, we follow Palmieri upriver where he bargains for masterpieces. In one case, he gets his hands on a priceless wood statue, which he somehow manages to trade for a Swiss Army knife. He would then sell this statue for an enormous sum of money to a dealer, who then sold it to the Dallas Museum of Art. In the book, we watch this happen again and again. Priceless work of sacred art is purchased for laughably small amounts of money, sometimes traded for a generator or even stolen right out of graves.
The tribal art market is worth over $100 million dollars today. And now we have a vanishing Borneo—from its animals to its ancient forests, to its peoples and cultural heritage.
Recommend the video below--there is also a companion book.
Kalimantaan is one of my favorite novels of all time, and The Most Offending Soul Alive is a brilliant retelling of the story of, well, one of the most offending souls alive--not really, though!
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