United States
£ GBP
Originally published in 1959.
Tom Harrisson, widely known as a Television personality (The Borneo Story, Birds' Nest Soup), also enjoys a reputation as an outstanding traveler; a pioneer in new methods of social & market research, a leading ornithologist, a long-time radio critic, & author. During the war, he did a series of important jobs in civilian & naval intelligence before performing with supreme unimportance the functions of an infantry private. Later, via Sandhurst & the Reece Corps he joined S.O.E., & ended up by jumping into Japanese-held Borneo-the first white man to do so He landed, as he puts it, on his backside at the highest inhabited point in that great island, the Kelabit village of Bario-a whole community living inside one great 'longhouse', without walls or privacy, but with an immense virility & variety of cultural & material wealth-& of human personality. Harrisson led the hill tribes of Borneo to war, then stayed on to lead the far interior back into the ways of peace. In fact, with a few breaks, he has been there ever since-latterly as Govt Ethnologist & Curator of the famed Sarawak Museum. Today he lives happily in Sarawak, in an old wooden house with a German wife, assorted Dayak retainers, five tortoise-shell cats & three orangutangs. But for much of the year he is travelling. And as often as possible he revisits his beloved hinterland. This book, the first he has written in 16 years, tells the story of Borneo's remarkable interior as it was before the white man came, living remote, vivid & often violent; then of those strange & stirring events which followed upon the sudden rain of parachutists from out of the equatorial sky. Adventure, humor, tragedy & anthropology are intertwined in a book unlike any other known to us. World Within is a story exceptional in its kind. No one else has had so deep & wide an experience against which to savor, enjoy (& sometimes reject) the high evergreen, teeming, intricate world inside Borneo. No one else could have written it.
