Kona Stories hosts a nonfiction book club discussing “Savage Harvest” by Carl Hoffman on Tuesday.
Kona Stories hosts a nonfiction book club discussing “Savage Harvest” by Carl Hoffman on Tuesday.
The group meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the store. Book groups are free if books are purchased at Kona Stories, or a $5 donation is requested.
Nine thousand miles from home, Hoffman sat cross-legged in a wood hut in northwestern New Guinea, facing 40 silent, barefoot men in ill-fitting T-shirts. He’d come to solve the disappearance, 50 years earlier, of a scion of one of America’s most famous fortunes. But after spending weeks losing weight on a diet of ramen, fish, and sato, made from palm trunk, and making no progress, he realized he’d been arrogant. He’d hoped that these people, the jungle-dwelling Asmat, would share one of their most closely guarded secrets. But as an interpreter relayed Hoffman’s questions, the men simply stared back.
Their silence, it turned out, was part of the answer.
A Washington D.C. native, Hoffman has spent his career as a magazine writer and author reporting from the “nooks and crannies of the world,” with D.C. serving as his base. In stories for Smithsonian and National Geographic Traveler (where he’s a contributing editor) and in his books, 2001’s “Hunting Warbirds” and 2010’s “The Lunatic Express,” Hoffman has indulged his fascination with the world’s overlooked, such as migrant workers in Southeast Asia, and with solitary adventurers taking refuge from the West. In his new book “Savage Harvest,” he writes about both these kinds of people, or rather the collision between them.
Info: Brenda or Joy, 324-0350, www.konastories.com