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Im Reich Der Inseln (2013)

by Tim Flannery(Favorite Author)

3.45 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

3100211162 (ISBN13: 9783100211163)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

S.Fischer

review 1: This is an account of expeditions by Australian biologists to South Pacific islands to the east of New Guinea to collect rare mammals in the 1980s and the 1990s. Since the islands are isolated, the mammals are mostly bats, which could be carried by the wind, and rats, which could float on pieces of vegetation from island to island. Because of the dearth of mammals, the human inhabitants of the islands were often traditionally cannibals: where else were they going to get red meat? The islanders have been in contact with the Europeans and with Christianity for centuries, and the anthropological stories are not as interesting as those in Flannery's previous book about expeditions to the highlands of New Guinea.
review 2: Mr. Flannery is one of those from the schoo... morel of "hunt down one of everything and kill it" culture. I till wonder why they're called scientists, what happens when they catch the one and only left of anything and kill it? This kind of thinking is part of the problem behind the idea of Western Man. It isn't good enough just to be left as a miraculous adaptation of evolution with a life of its own to live, but all part of defining each and every bit of anything that comes to be on Planet Earth. That's why I had a hard time digging this book. He does conduct an apologia for his species at the end, and he did happen to discover ten completely unique species in his romp through NEw Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, and the Bismarck Islands. But unless you are a forceps and butterfly net wielding dweeb form the English Olde Schoole, I dunno if you will like it much or not. Even the presence of naked women rubbing against him clad in only corn-cob pipes can't shake Mr. Flannery's tweedy determination to conduct his most serious Polynesian mammalian research. Admirable, I suppose, if you are cut of the same cloth. less

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