A really interesting life including time in Borneo during World war II,conservation of sea turtles and orang-utangs and a polar expedition. ( )

Tom Harrisson lived from 1911 to 1976 and was, as Heimann puts it, "an adventurer who lived among cannibals." That in and of itself is enough to write a book about but Tom was also a man who even as a child loved to push buttons. He had an ongoing battle with hierarchy and thrived on seeing what he could get away with on a daily basis. In his adult life, often drunk and disorderly, it was his brilliant mind that made him forgivable to most people; everyone except his own father. His brilliance is the only reason I can think of for his friend to turn a blind eye when Tom begins a blatantly obvious affair with the friend's wife. Aside from "stealing women from their men" as the Grateful Dead said, Tom's passion was researching flora and fauna and traveled to such places as Sarawak and New Hebrides to study new species. Later, when he met the cannibals, he became interested in sociology and became an expert at observing culture. Even though the rest of The Most Offending Soul Alive isn't as interesting Heimann goes on to colorfully detail the rest of Harrisson's life, ending with his fatal accident in January 1976. While not much else has been written about Harrisson otherwise, I feel that Heimann's is a bias laden, no-stone-left-unturned kind of biography.

This is a one of the best biographies I have read in forty years; both for the excellence of the writing, and for the astonishing achievements of its subject. It's hard to know where to begin with the biography of a man who had a profound influence on ornithology, sociology, anthropology, wildlife conservation, historiography, paleontology, political science and the successful conduct of two guerrilla wars (twenty years apart) in North Borneo. And this a man with no academic qualifications and almost constantly at war with academia, the military, the establishment and his own family. Harrison was a polymath - someone who was interested in everything - who drove himself, and inspired others around him, to achieve remarkable things in all of those fields. Heimann does a wonderful job with her subject, reminding me of Barbara Tuchmann at her best. ( )