The Last Wild Men of Borneo

October 15, 2017

While Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser was helping Borneo's Penan tribe battle multinational logging conglomerates (he was declared an enemy of the state and vanished in 2000), American Michael Palmieri was getting rich by buying up Borneo artworks for pennies and selling them for a fortune. Following the New York Times best-selling Savage Harvest; with a 100,000-copy first printing.

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January 15, 2018
An expertly wrought tale of exploration, adventure, and mischief by Hoffman (Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, 2014, etc.), who returns to the South Pacific island of Borneo to tell it.The "last wild men of Borneo" are not the headhunters or circus freaks of yore but instead two foreigners, one Swiss and one American, who entered into the rainforest and the territory of little-known people and carved out different fortunes for themselves. Bruno Manser arrived in 1983, looking for something outside himself; he had resisted the draft, bounced around among mountains and coastlines, and found his calling fighting the logging companies that were busily clear-cutting the vast old-growth forests of the interior. The companies won, for, as the author writes, "the untouched forests of Borneo are gone." The question that occupies the author is this: what happened to Manser, who inspired a near-cultlike movement and commanded the loyalty of many admirers in the outside world, "surrounded by sycophants and followers who couldn't say no to him"? As with his book on Michael Rockefeller, Hoffman is fascinated by the possibilities of someone who simply walked into the jungle and disappeared: did those headhunters get him? Was he murdered by loggers? The other wild man is American art collector Michael Palmieri who, as the anthropologists say, irrevocably changed the culture of the true "wild people" of Borneo by introducing the market to them. For decades, he has bought and sold Dayak and other ethnic art, perhaps against international laws in the trade of cultural goods, even as he has found himself unable to live among his own people. The two stories do not always neatly track, but Hoffman does an excellent job entering the worlds and minds of two men who did not fit in and who carved out their own destinies--if, of course, in other people's homelands.At once cautionary and inspiring; adventure travel at its best.

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January 29, 2018
Travel writer Hoffman (Savage Harvest) uses his own travels to the Pacific island of Borneo to frame biographies of Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser and American art dealer Michael Palmieri, two Westerners whose activities on the remote island significantly affected the land and its people. Though Manser and Palmieri never actually met, they both found their calling in Borneo in the 1970s and 1980s. Palmieri, “a buccaneer” drawn to the island by wanderlust, became a distinguished collector and dealer of tribal art, collecting ancient pieces such as a Dayak carving of a powerful guardian spirit. Manser, meanwhile, was “a do-gooder” drawn to the self-sustenance and communal elements of the island. He spent over a decade living with the Penan tribe in Sarawak, and became an activist in cultural preservation, fighting against the destruction of the Penan land by logging conglomerates. Hoffman, who followed the footsteps of both men, interweaves cliff-hanging scenes, such as Manser suffering a pit viper bite and Palmieri smuggling artifacts, with a history of colonialism of the island. The result is a deeply informative anthropological study disguised as an adventure tale.