Als Andro Linklater im Auftrag von Time-Life ein Buch über Kopfjäger im Dschungel von Borneo schreiben soll, ist klar: Die zivilisierte Welt will vor den blutrünstigen Ritualen der Iban erschauern. Doch es kommt anders: Linklater findet eine Kultur, die auf ihre Art hoch entwickelt ist; der Verlag zieht den Auftrag zurück. Mit viel Esprit und Humor berichtet Linklater vom Leben der Iban, von ihrer Religion, ihrer Anbaukultur, ihrem Liebesleben. Im Gegensatz zu den gastfreundlichen, klugen und lebenserfahrenen Iban erscheinen plötzlich die Weißen als die eigentlich Wilden. »276 prallvolle Seiten. Andro Linklaters spritziges Borneo-Buch düpiert die Arroganz der westlichen Welt.« NEWMAG, Peter Henning
Barely two centuries ago, most of the world's productive land still belonged either communally to traditional societies or to the higher powers of monarch or church. But that pattern, and the ways of life that went with it, were consigned to history as a result of the most creative - and, at the same time, destructive - cultural force in the modern era: the idea of individual, exclusive ownership of land. This notion laid waste to traditional communal civilisations, displacing entire peoples from their homelands, and brought into being a unique concept of individual freedom and a distinct form of representative government and democratic institutions. Other great civilizations, in Russia, China, and the Islamic world, evolved very different structures of land ownership, and thus very different forms of government and social responsibility. The seventeenth-century English surveyor William Petty was the first man to recognise the connection between private property and free-market capitalism; the American radical Wolf Ladejinsky redistributed land in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea after the Second World War to make possible the emergence of Asian tiger economies. Through the eyes of these remarkable individuals and many more, including Chinese emperors and German peasants, Andro Linklater here presents the evolution of land ownership to offer a radically new view of mankind's place on the planet.
The life of Compton Mackenzie, author of "Sinister Street" and "Whiskey Galore". He came from an acting family, became a best-selling writer, a master-spy in Greece, a Roman Catholic convert, a buyer of islands and a Scottish Nationalist. The author's father was a close friend of Mackenzie.
A funny and often poignant study of the Iban people of Sarawak. Expecting them to be noble, bare-breasted savages in dugout canoes, the author found a people who, whilst they did decorate their homes with heads not their own, also possessed outboard motors, chainsaws and I love New York T-shirts.
