Kalimantaan
Kalimantaan

Author: C. S. Godshalk

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1999-04-15

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780805055344

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One hundred and sixty years ago a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world he created eventually took in a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns paid for in human heads. Here, polite Victorian conventions coexisted tenuously with one of the most violent cultures on earth, often with startling results: pockets of tenderness and extreme brutality appearing where least expected. Into this world flowed a small tribe of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, and saints-- the madly talented and simply mad. And the women followed: wives and would-be wives, spinster nursemaids and heartless schemers, the rigidly virtuous and the virtually desperate. And always, the children, innocents too often the victims of an elemental nature both lush and deadly. Kalimantaan is the story of this world, these people. But the deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius.

All Elevations Unknown
All Elevations Unknown

Author: Sam Lightner Jr.

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2002-07-09

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0767907752

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“Sam Lightner, Jr., combines two tales of adventure, one historic and the other modern-day in his page-turner . . . With its rich sense of place and history, All Elevations Unknown offers a surprisingly fresh twist to an adventure-climbing tale.” –Climbing Magazine In the spring of 1999, armed with little more than a description from a book and a map labeled “all elevations unknown,” Sam Lightner and his German rock-climbing buddy, Volker, found themselves deep in the jungles of Borneo on a mission to climb a mountain that was only rumored to exist. What little they knew about the mountain they had learned from the memoirs of Major Tom Harrisson, a British World War II soldier who in 1945 had been assigned the near-impossible mission of parachuting blindly into the thick Borneo rainforest–where the natives had a grisly habit of cutting off heads–to try to reclaim the island for the Allies. A captivating, utterly original combination of travel adventure memoir and historical re-creation, All Elevations Unknown charts Lightner’s exhilarating and at times harrowing quest to ascend the mountain Batu Lawi in the face of leeches, vipers, and sweat bees, and to keep his team together in one of the earth’s most treacherous uncharted pockets. Along the way, he reconstructs a fascinating historical narrative that chronicles Tom Harrisson’s adventures there during the war and illuminates an astonishing piece of forgotten World War II history. Rife with suspense and vivid detail, the two intertwining tales open up the island of Borneo, its people, and its history in a powerful, unforgettable way, taking adventure writing to new heights.

Into the Heart of Borneo
Into the Heart of Borneo

Author: Redmond O'Hanlon

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0140073973

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'The most hilarious travel book in many years' - Standard. Armed with equipment and advice from 22 SAS, Hereford, and accompanied by three trackers, Redmond O'Hanlon, the naturalist, and James Fenton, the poet, set out on a long river voyage into the interior of a tropical jungle hoping to reach the Tiban massif. At once funny and knowledgeable, Redmond O'Hanlon's account of how they battled with insects, discomfort and setbacks is a hugely entertaining and informative adventure story in the best tradition of the world's great travel classics. 'A marvellous book ... a very funny and expert witness' - Edward St Aubyn in the Tatler. 'Consistently exciting, often funny, and erudite without ever being overwhelming' - Punch.

Through the Wire
Through the Wire

Author: David Savage

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9781864488685

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The first graphic account of the major and very bloody battle at an outpost called Duc Lap involving members of the Australian Training Team in Vietnam and their American equivalents.

Central Borneo
Central Borneo

Author: Jérôme Rousseau

Publisher: copyright reverted to author

Published: 1989-12-31

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0198277164

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This comparative study of the peoples of central Borneo offers an unusually detailed description of a pre-colonial society. Professor Rousseau analyses a region characterized by great ethnic diversity and unravels the relation between ethnicity, social organization, language, and cultureamong its peoples.Geographically, central Borneo is divided into several river basins, each of which forms part of a different country. Because of this, the area has traditionally been dealt with in a fragmented way by academics. Yet the records of scholars, missionaries, and administrators that have been keptsince the area came under colonial control at the beginning of the twentieth century provide ethnographic and historical data virtually unmatched in the rest of the insular South East Asia. Professor Rousseau's extensive survey of the available literature and archival material, backed up by manyyears of fieldwork in the region, challenges some long-held views and assumptions. First he shows that, while ethnic identity is normally expected to act as a divider between social groups, this area of great ethnic diversity actually forms a single society. Secondly, although it is thought thatsmall-scale, stateless societies tend to show little evidence of social inequality, he demonstrates that the communities of central Borneo have until recently had a clearly hierarchical structure.The uniquely detailed evidence presented in this study and its comparative approach shed an entirely new light not only on central Borneo, but also on the fundamental nature of societies.