Alyssa: I first read an article about this book in the English edition of Marie Claire whilst lounging around the day spa in Phuket and was delighted to find a copy of the book at Bangkok airport in all places! The book is an autobiography by Sabine Kuegler, a German girl who grew up in the jungles of West Papua, Indonesia. The book is an account of her fabulous childhood where she and her family (her parents are linguists) totally integrated themselves into a warmongering tribe untouched by modern civilisation in an effort to learn more about the Fayu tribe's language and their way of life. Her candid account of jungle survival is the stuff of adventure story books such as feasting on roast bat, crocodile and fat white grubs and hunting birds and wild pig with a bow and arrow.
Her account of the Fayu tribe's way of life is fascinating. For instance, they would tame a wild dingo pup by hugging it close to their bodies for several days so that when it grows up and is released back in the wild, it would remember the scent the person and would not attack if it crosses path.(I particularly love the photo in the book depicting a tribal woman breast feeding her kid on one side, and breast feeding a dingo pup on the other!)
As the story goes, for a long while, the jungle and its timeless ways were all that the author knew before moving back to the western world at 17 where she attended a Swiss boarding school and had to adjust to learning how to survive in the concrete jungle of modern civilisation. The undercurrent of her autobiography is the feeling of displacement - not at home in the West, yet probably too westernised now to feel content in the jungle. Whatever her dilemma is, I'm sure it has made her a lot of money in the process given this book was a hit when it was first published in German and now republished in English.
A great, entertaining read.
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