#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Timeline, Sphere, and Congo comes the sequel to the smash-hit Jurassic Park, a thriller that’s been millions of years in the making. “Fast and gripping.”—The Washington Post Book World It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end—the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, and the island indefinitely closed to the public. There are rumors that something has survived. . . . “Harrowing thrills . . . fast-paced and engaging.”—People “A very scary read.”—Entertainment Weekly “Action-packed.”—New York Daily News “An edge-of-the-seat tale.”—St. Petersburg Times
Perhaps it is not possible to experience all the mysterious sounds, the unfamiliar smells, and the spectacular sights of a tropical rainforest without ever visiting one. But this exhilarating and honest book comes wondrously close to taking the reader on such a journey. Bruce M. Beehler, a widely traveled expert on birds and tropical ecology, recounts fascinating details from twelve field trips he has taken to the tropics over the past three decades. As a researcher, he brings to life the exotic rainforests and the people who inhabit them; as a conservationist, he makes a plea for better ways of managing rainforestsa resource that the world cannot do without. Drawing on his experiences in Papua New Guinea, India, Madagascar, Indonesia, the Philippines, Panama, and the Ivory Coast, Beehler describes the surprisesboth pleasant and unpleasantof doing science and conservation in the field. He explains the role that rainforests play in the lives of indigenous peoples and the crucial importance of understanding local cultures, customs, and politics. The author concludes with simple but tough solutions for maintaining rainforest health, expressing fervent hope that his great-grandchildren and others may one day also hear the rainforest whisper its secrets.
Jim Elmslie traces events in Irian Jaya/West Papua from the departure of the Dutch in 1963 to December 1999. The majority of the indigenous people of the area consider themselves West Papuans living in the land of West Papua, a country incorporated into the Indonesian state without their consent or approval. Made up of Melanesian peoples, the western part of New Guinea is one of the least developed places on earth with the largest expanses outside the Amazon of untouched and, in some cases still unexplored, rainforest and wilderness. It is a region ripe for economic exploitation. Irian Jaya under the Gun chronicles the rapid changes that are taking place under the guise of Indonesian economic development and its generally pro-crony, pro-military, pro-multinational corporation, and anti-Papuan thrust. It describes what can happen to an indigenous population when insensitive governments and avaricious multinationals are more concerned about profits than the environment or the people inhabiting the land.
Braun (geography, U. of Minnesota) provides a new viewpoint on the complex cultural, political, and intellectual forces involved in the forest policies of British Columbia. Employing poststructuralist theory and using the 1993 protests over logging in Clayoquot Sound as his starting point, Braun assesses the colonial thinking behind 19th- century forest policies, the struggles of native peoples to regain their spaces, the assertion of so-called rational forest management as a new version of colonialism, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee's use of nature photography to promote their notion of pristine wilderness, ecotourism, and the continued impact of the vision of early 20th-century painter Emily Carr. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.
Two years before this story begins, the Liawep were living deep in the jungle of Papua, New Guinea, long forgotten by the outside world. Numbering seventy-nine men, women, and children, the tribe worshipped a mountain, dressed in leaves, and hid when planes flew overhead, believing them to be evil sanguma birds. Their discovery by a missionary hit the headlines in 1993. Galvanized by the reports of people living in Stone Age conditions, Edward Marriott set out to find the Liawep. Banned from visiting the tribe by the New Guinea government, he assembled his own ragtag patrol and ventured illegally into the wilderness in search of his quarry. Nothing could have prepared him for what he found or for the dramatic events that followed. A thrilling, superbly written adventure, The Lost Tribe is a memorable account of what happens when good intentions go awry, when rational man meets primal beliefs, and when a small, primitive people are ensnared by the predations of civilization.
This book examines the role of the international community in the handover of the Dutch colony of West Papua/Irian Jaya to Indonesia in the 1960s and questions whether or not the West Papuan people ever genuinely exercised the right to self-determination guaranteed to them in the UN-brokered Dutch/Indonesian agreement of 1962. Indonesian, Dutch, US, Soviet, Australian and British involvement is discussed, but particular emphasis is given to the central part played by the United Nations in the implementation of this agreement. As guarantor, the UN temporarily took over the territory's administration from the Dutch before transferring control to Indonesia in 1963. After five years of Indonesian rule, a UN team returned to West Papua to monitor and endorse a controversial act of self-determination that resulted in a unanimous vote by 1022 Papuan 'representatives' to reject independence. Despite this, the issue is still very much alive today as a crisis-hit Indonesia faces continued armed rebellion and growing calls for freedom in West Papua.
In The Second World, scholar Parag Khanna, chosen as one of Esquire’s 75 Most Influential People of the Twenty-First Century, reveals how America’s future depends on its ability to compete with the European Union and China to forge relationships with the Second World, the pivotal regions of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East, and East Asia that are growing in influence and economic strength. Informed, witty, and armed with a traveler’s intuition for blending into diverse cultures, Khanna depicts second-world societies from the inside out, observing how globalization divides them into winners and losers–and shows how China, Europe, and America use their unique imperial gravities to pull the second-world countries into their orbits. Along the way, Khanna explains how Arabism and Islamism compete for the Arab soul, reveals how Iran and Saudi Arabia play the superpowers against one another, unmasks Singapore’s inspirational role in East Asia, and psychoanalyzes the second-world leaders whose decisions are reshaping the balance of power.
The question central to this paper is why after 30 years of Indonesian control has West Papuan nationalism persisted, and what prospects do nationalist groups have of achieving their aim of an independent West Papua? This paper contends that the answer to these questions are to be found in Indonesian politico/economic policies.