In 1961 Michael Rockefeller, twenty-three, son of the governor of New York, disappeared off the coast of Asmat in Dutch New Guinea while collecting art. The family said drowning. Hoffman went and lived in Asmat villages for months, worked through Dutch government and missionary archives, and came back with a detailed case that he was killed and eaten, and why — a specific reckoning for three village elders shot by a Dutch patrol years earlier. The strength of the book is that Hoffman explains the logic on its own terms rather than as savagery, and is unsparing about what the Dutch and the collectors were doing there.
Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art