This is less a travel book than the memoir of the author’s emotional journey. Kira Salak seems to be a professional adventurer, which is pretty cool, and she’s also a compelling storyteller, bringing to life her experience traveling around New Guinea’s swamps, rainforests, mountains, crime-ridden cities, and even a rebel refugee camp, in 1995. What she does not do quite so well is illuminate the lives of the people she meets; she’s in New Guinea to discover herself.

And I get the sense she’s spent a lot of time analyzing herself, and no wonder, having received more than her share of dysfunction being raised by evangelical Objectivist parents, and feeling compelled to go off on life-threatening journeys to prove herself. But she was 24 when she took this trip and only a few years older when she wrote about it, and some of the ways she describes her emotional experiences seem a little simplistic. I also couldn’t help but shake my head at her idea that she was going to recover from the trauma of a previous kidnapping (also on a dangerous trip) by traveling through another dangerous place where, unfamiliar with the environment, she would be at the mercy of strangers. It’s no wonder this doesn’t really work for her… or it doesn’t seem to, until the epilogue, which wraps everything up rather too neatly; insisting, for instance, that she wasn’t taught to fear like other girls, when she spent most of the preceding 400 pages preoccupied with danger and fear. Her threshold for what she’s willing to do anyway is certainly higher than most women’s, but she rarely feels safe enough on this trip to enjoy herself.

That said, Salak does write well about the places she experienced: the grueling hikes through swamps and mountains; the wonder of a helicopter ride over the jungle; the tragedy of the refugees from the western portion of New Guinea, victims of genocide from Indonesia; the hubris of missionaries trying to drag locals into a modern way of life. When she does write about locals, it’s really quite good; I loved reading about the calm swamp village where tiny children learned to paddle in tiny canoes, and she was taken in by a man who had no plates or silverware because his wife took them all when she left and moved across the road. And for that matter, about the truck drivers in Mozambique, where Salak’s early attempt at adventure got her in well over her head. But she rarely stays in one place long, and I was left wanting to learn more about these people: for instance, about the women living away from their families at the YWCA in Port Moresby, despite rampant crime there.

Overall, this was enjoyable reading; it seems a bit long for what it is, but Salak has such an intense and varied journey that I’m not sure what could be cut. I think this book is worth reading, though if your primary interest in it is learning about New Guinea, you may come away frustrated.

I am not the intended audience for this book; I read it looking for something set in Papau New Guinea from which I would learn a bit about the country and its people, while the book seems intended for assignment in undergraduate anthropology classes as a supplementary textbook. It did fulfill my goal of learning about the lives of the Gebusi, a small tribe living in the rainforest of Papau New Guinea’s huge Western Province. On the other hand, it’s a shame that academic texts aren’t written or edited with the goal of satisfying the reader; the author’s goal seems to be more about teaching students about anthropology and the realities of ethnographic work than answering the reader’s curiosity. In other words, the gulf between this and popular ethnographies like $2.00 a Day or City of Thorns is huge.

Knauft is an anthropologist who initially lived with the Gebusi for two years, from 1980 to 1982, accompanied by his wife Eileen (whether she is also an anthropologist is unclear; though he discusses his feelings about developments among the Gebusi and relationships with individuals among them, this is definitely not a memoir). Despite sporadic contact with Australian officers, during the time that they colonized the country, the Gebusi at the time retained a very traditional culture, including a tradition of spirit mediumship, all-night dances and séances, and elaborate initiation rituals for young men. They were easily able to provide for their material needs with crops that require little effort in cultivation, and enjoyed leisure time and “good company,” along with a cultural flourishing that resulted from the Australians' subduing a nearby tribe with a habit of raiding their longhouses and massacring their people. But it wasn't an ideal life: while they had enough to eat, nutrition was poor, illness rife and few people made it to the age of 40; the society was patriarchal and women excluded from many aspects of it; and execution for sorcery was rampant. The Gebusi believed that all deaths were caused by humans, so deaths by sickness or accident led to sorcery inquests and often more death. Nevertheless, they weren’t the stereotype of a cannibalistic rainforest people (though there is cannibalism in their past): due process was important, including a waiting period after the death and finding a neutral spirit medium to preside over the inquest.

After his initial stay, Knauft returned to the Gebusi in 1998, at which point their culture was transformed: many had moved to a nearby town with an airstrip and government services. They converted to various forms of Christianity, sent their children to school, and gave up sorcery inquests and executions entirely. Men’s leisure time now revolved around local soccer leagues, while women sold produce (usually with little success) in the local market. The several tribes inhabiting the town mocked their own traditional cultures in Independence Day celebrations, and Gebusi practices such as dancing and initiation rites seemed to be dying out as young people attempted to embrace the modern world.

But then in 2008, everything had changed again: loss of funding meant government services had largely vanished, and the Gebusi were reviving their traditional culture, including building longhouses and conducting initiation rites; as they retained their land and ability to sustain themselves, they didn’t seem to miss the government or markets much. But spirit mediumship had died out, so that despite lingering suspicions of sorcery they were no longer able to conduct inquests, and many of the Gebusi continued to attend Christian services.

It is fascinating material, and the author seems to have made personal friends with many of the Gebusi and to respect them and their culture. He is aware of his own fallibility and works to distinguish unique incidents from those typical of the culture. And he spends enough time with Gebusi to get to know them and to be able to tell stories in context about incidents that occur in the community.

However, for all the author’s talk about how this is intended to be less formal and more personal than typical academic writing, and for all that the writing is clearer and more engaging than in most textbooks, the content is still basically that of a textbook. Sometimes its information is incomplete, as if the author has made his point and is ready to move on, regardless of whether readers have more questions. For instance, for all that Knauft mentions sorcery executions frequently, I still don’t know how most of these deaths occurred. Both in the book and on his website (which for some reason includes entire stories in pictures that aren’t in the book but deserved to be), he describes instances in which the accused is killed in the forest by a relative of the deceased, which the community accepts because of the “spiritual evidence” against the accused. How common is this, as opposed to public or formal executions? Is everyone given the opportunity to exonerate themselves via trial by cooking, or only some people? In one case described, the sorcerer purportedly comes from another village and the searchers lose the trail; is this unusual, or common?

In other cases, it can be vague in a way typical of academic writing, obscuring specifics behind general language. For instance, a boy and later young man with whom the author is close leaves his community due to “a dispute” and travels to the nearest city, where he works for two years. This is after he and his younger brother are orphaned when he’s about 12. Who raised the boys after that, and what was the dispute? These are human interest questions, but their answers also speak to Gebusi culture. And despite telling us about their terrible life expectancy in the early 80s, the author has nothing to say about how having and then losing a local medical clinic affected the Gebusi. Their lifespans are still much shorter than Americans’, but were there improvements?

And bizarrely, he mentions only on his aforementioned website, in a caption to a longhouse diagram, that rigidly separate sleeping areas for men and women mean that sexual relations happened in the rainforest rather than in bed. Doesn't this deserve to be in the book, rather than only the "alternative sexual practices" (i.e. adolescent boys giving blowjobs because swallowing semen was supposed to help them become men)? But in the book he does mention a couple caught having an illicit affair in a house, so maybe the rainforest sex only applies to those few families who actually live in the longhouse? Knauft isn't too shy to include a scene of a young man propositioning him, so why isn't this in the book?

Overall, I learned from this book, but I think it would be a little off-base for most non-academic readers (the “Broader Connections” bullet point summaries of key ideas in anthropology at the end of each chapter, with much bolded text, are definitely eyeroll-worthy). While it’s not as short as the page count would have it – there’s a lot of text on each page – it was worth my time.

I read the first two stories in this collection, the only work of fiction by a Papua New Guinean author that I could find. And it's a short book to boot, at only 144 pages (perhaps a dozen of which are occupied by illustrations), so believe me when I say it had to be awful for me to decide to abandon it.

But you don't have to take my word for it! Sample it yourself. Here's the opening of the first story, "A Medal Without Honour," typed exactly as written:

Two Japanese zeros appearing from nowhere, swept menacingly low, spitting death all around the long column of over-burdened natives. Deadly bullets raining down from the mounted machine guns on those mean looking flying machines. The natives panicked and scattered for cover in panic, under the punishing heavy loads they carried. Food and ammunition for the allied troops, holed up along the ranges of what was later to become known as the "famous Kokoda Trail". This was a painstaking task and the natives were beginning to get used to it. The task of a carrier or a "cargo boy", promised nothing more than death or survival as the ultimate fate. Such was the ordeal and the nature of this punishing task that saw some natives flee to freedom during the first week of forced recruitment, by the ANGAU officers. They remained frozen wherever they fell when they took cover meditating silently to their long gone ancestors, hoping they would help them stay alive!

Harsh words of command barked from the white boss-man amidst blood-curdling screams of dying men, as the deadly flying machines made another run. Again the Japanese fighters approached with rage, irritating and deafening. Dry leaves, tree branches, and even tree trunks including kunai grass whithered and wavered as they absorbed bullets . Somebody down the column yelped from their hide-out and began moaning in pain. Another screamed and sprang up from the opposite side of the track, tossing off the heavy napsack and began jerking involuntarily for the last dance. He dropped head long onto his face and died.

This is representative of the story as a whole. The book is rife with spelling, grammatical and punctuation errors. Verb tense shifts randomly. Word choice is poor: the approaching fighter planes, which drive people into a panic, are "irritating," while the panicked carriers "meditate" to their ancestors? And sometimes it's so poor as to be nonsensical: dry leaves absorb bullets, causing them to "whither"? Repetition of the wrong words and phrases is distracting: the natives "panicked and scattered for cover in panic"; the airplanes are referred to as "flying machines" twice in two paragraphs even though the narrative immediately identifies the type of plane in question. Momentum never has a chance to build: as the fighter planes are sweeping down, the author calls a halt to the action to make vague assertions about the nature of the carriers' jobs (called a "painstaking task" and a "punishing task" in back-to-back sentences). And the ideas are expressed in a clunky manner; so the jobs "promised nothing more than death or survival as the ultimate fate" - well, either death or survival is the ultimate fate of anyone caught up in war.

The story goes on like this for about ten pages before, on the eve of the definitive battle, it without warning shifts to its primary character (I hesitate to call him a protagonist when he plays only a small role in the story) as an old man. The shift is so abrupt it took me a couple paragraphs to figure out what had happened. It continues for two or three more pages without ever finding a plot, then ends.

I read the second story ("A Sordid Affair") anyway, because it is short. It at least has something resembling a plot. But the author would need to do a lot better than that to compensate for the truly terrible writing. There are self-published books better than this.

I inhaled this book in the space of less than 24 hours: fast reading for me even though it’s only 257 pages. Set in remote Papau New Guinea in the 1930s, this is a fictionalized account of the brief collaboration of three real-life anthropologists: Margaret Mead, her then-husband Reo Fortune, and her future husband Gregory Bateson. Here they are renamed Nell Stone, Schuyler Fenwick and Andrew Bankson, respectively.

It is a fascinating tale of human relationships and anthropology; unusually for fiction, the author makes the characters’ work a major aspect of the book rather than a background detail or subplot, and questions about anthropology are front and center: How involved ought scientists become in the lives of their subjects? Can anthropologists truly be objective, or do they project their own desires or prejudices onto the societies they study? What methods are acceptable for gaining information about a culture? By necessity, the three protagonists are intensely involved in their work, and one of the book’s most animated scenes involves Nell’s receiving a colleague's manuscript (a fictional analogue of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture) in the mail, and the three spending all night reading and arguing about it. (That doesn’t mean the novel is dry, but that the author does an excellent job of showing the power of ideas and intellectual growth.)

But it soon becomes clear that the three approach their field from very different perspectives. Nell, already famous for a ground-breaking book based on a prior expedition, wants to fall in love with local cultures and erects no boundaries between herself and the people she studies. Fen seems drawn to fieldwork primarily to escape strictures of “civilized” behavior, and to be the most important man in town. Bankson, drawn to anthropology as an intellectual pursuit, holds himself aloof from the locals and doesn’t seem to enjoy fieldwork at all. Of course attraction grows between Nell and Bankson, with dramatic consequences.

Euphoria has an engaging plot, and three protagonists are complex and believable folk, set against a colorful backdrop. The local tribespeople remain in the background, though they do have more individuality, and more of a voice, than their counterparts in similar books such as Patchett's State of Wonder. It helps that the anthropologists are quick to learn local languages and spend substantial time interacting with people and trying to understand them. The writing is good, though the point-of-view is unnecessarily jumpy; the majority of the book is told from Bankson’s first-person perspective, but it also includes third-person sections following Nell and excerpts from her journal.

Beneath the surface, though, this is a dark story, in ways that aren’t ever really dealt with. Fen turns out to be a very ugly person, but his crimes are generally mentioned briefly and ambiguously rather than openly; those not paying close attention could easily miss most of it.

I understand the value of subtlety in fiction, but such coyness feels out of place in a novel with an explicit and not entirely consensual sex scene on page 11. And it's especially disconcerting when Fen is based on a real person; the author should have owned her claims one way or the other, at least by explaining in her Author’s Note either their basis in the historical record, or that she invented them for storytelling purposes. Otherwise, it just looks like defaming the dead. I am also uncomfortable with her making Nell a victim in ways Margaret Mead was not. Is King pandering to the crowd inclined to find any successful female character “unlikeable” unless her vulnerability is constantly emphasized? It’s hard to imagine anyone disliking the big-hearted, enthusiastic Nell, though at least in the book she is not much for monogamy and again, we don’t know to what extent her personality was invented for the novel.

So, an enjoyable book, yes, but don’t take it for history. I liked it, but in addition to displaying the strong storytelling skills that King has in abundance, I do expect historical fiction authors to take responsibility for their deviations from the record, and am disappointed that that was not done here.