Author Event | News from University of Hawai‘i Press

EVENT | Book Signing
6pm / Thursday, June 5 / Asia Bookroom (Australia)

Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan
written by Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffin

2014 | 328 pages | 55 illustrations, 2 maps
Cloth | ISBN: 978-0-8248-3714-3 | $54.00

“The orangutan population is plummeting with the destruction of their habitat for unsustainable land uses that is only benefiting a greedy few. To save them the more we can tell people about how important the orangutan and their forest habitat is, including telling their cultural history, the more chance we will have of saving the orangutan.” —Leif Cocks, founder of The Orangutan Project

Wild Man from Borneo offers the first comprehensive history of the human-orangutan encounter. Arguably the most humanlike of all the great apes, particularly in intelligence and behavior, the orangutan has been cherished, used, and abused ever since it was first brought to the attention of Europeans in the seventeenth century. The red ape has engaged the interest of scientists, philosophers, artists, and the public at large in a bewildering array of guises that have by no means been exclusively zoological or ecological. One reason for such a long-term engagement with a being found only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra is that, like its fellow great apes, the orangutan stands on that most uncomfortable dividing line between human and animal, existing, for us, on what has been called “the dangerous edge of the garden of nature.”

RSVP by the 4th of Jun by phone (+61 (0)2 6251 5191) or email Asia Room. Admission by donation to the Orangutan Project.