In his new book Savage Harvest,he writes about both these kinds of people, or rather the collision between them. 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. Most mornings he can be found writing at Tryst in Adams Morgan or at Big Bear Cafe, near his home in Bloomingdale. Their silence, it turned out, was part of the answer.Ī Washington native, Hoffman has spent his career as a magazine writer and author reporting from the “nooks and crannies of the world,” as he puts it, with DC serving as his base. But as an interpreter relayed Hoffman’s questions, the men simply stared back. He’d hoped that these people, the jungle-dwelling Asmat, would share one of their most closely guarded secrets. 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 come to solve the disappearance, 50 years earlier, of a scion of one of America’s most famous fortunes. Nine thousand miles from home, Carl Hoffman sat cross-legged in a wood hut in northwestern New Guinea, facing 40 silent, barefoot men in ill-fitting T-shirts.
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