Leah Polcar's Reviews > Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

The story is amazing, the telling of it is not. I felt as if Hoffman just could not decide on a thesis: is this about Asmat culture? Primitive art? Hoffman's travelogue? Michael Rockefeller's death? Colonial rule? There is a little bit about all these things and with the exception of presenting a compelling case to explain Rockefeller's disappearance in 1961 and the exposition of his feelings about "the primitive" (i.e. indigenous peoples) and how off-putting it is to swim in a river with poop floating by, the other threads are not supported adequately. Well, that is really only true in the case of politics (Netherlands v. Indonesia, Part III: Screw You) and primitive art, he does cover the Asmat culture quite extensively though I found it so repetitive that I wanted to hunt his head at times. There just didn't seem to be a lot of substance for the 300 pages: Rockefeller's disappearance is truly handled in about 50 (and that is counting the historical run-down in addition to examining plausible theories of which there really only seem to be two: the Asmat ate him or he drowned) and without delving more deeply into the issues discussed above, it sort of meandered occasionally circling back on itself to cover the same content again. Savage Harvest drinking game: take one drink every time Hoffman says something about the recency of headhunting (e.g. "while the Dutch denied that the Asmat were headhunters, headhunting widely still took place until at least the 1970s") or every time he mentions the Asmat like axes, fishing lures, or tobacco.

For a travelogue and discussion of "the primitive", I suggest Into the Heart of Borneo . Yeah, it isn't New Guinea, but it is close. Not that this was a bad book, but I can't as wholeheartedly recommend it as Amazon does.