The novelist Thomas McGuane moved to Montana many years ago, he has said, because he didn't want “writer hands.” He wanted to hunt and fish and walk outdoors. He wanted to avoid a soft life.
The journalist Doug Bock Clark, in order to write his immersive, densely reported and altogether remarkable first book, “The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life,” moved about as far from the world's air-conditioned urban centers as it is still possible to get.
He spent years with the Lamalerans, a tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who live on a remote volcanic Indonesian island in the Savu Sea. They are the world's last subsistence whalers, and as fishermen they are fierce. Lamaleran men have been known to stride into the churning waves, grab tiger sharks by their tails, drag them onto shore and club them to death.
Read Full Article »