Nigel Barley: 14 books

El antropólogo inocente es un texto ciertamente insólito del que se dijo: «Probablemente el libro más divertido que se ha publicado este año. Nigel Barley hace con la antropología lo que Gerald Durrell hizo con la zoología» (David Halloway). El autor, doctorado en antropología en Oxford,...

Nigel Barley travels to Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork ‘somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly,...

In 1985, Dr. Nigel Barley, senior anthropologist at The British Museum, set off for the relatively unknown Indonesian island of Sulawesi in search of the Toraja, a people whose culture includes headhunting, transvestite priests and the massacre of buffalo. In witty and finely crafted prose, Barley offers...

Nigel Barley returns to Cameroon on hearing that the elaborate and fearsome Dowayo circumcision ceremony, performed at six or seven year intervals, is about to take place. Yet, like much else in this hilarious book by the author of The Innocent Anthropologist, the circumcision ceremony proves frustratingly...

Sir Stamford Raffles was a British colonial trader who, in 1819, founded the island city-state of Singapore. Today, Singapore is a world alpha city ranked alongside London, New York, and Tokyo. In this intriguing book - part history, part travelogue - the author revisits the places that were important...

Not many Glaswegian schoolgirls have grown up to become revolutionary heroes of distant, eastern nations but Muriel Stewart Walker did just that. Under a multitude of different names – ‘K’tut Tantri’ and ‘Surabaya Sue’ being the best known – this Scottish-born, self-proclaimed Hollywood...

Between the two World Wars, the most famous employee of the British Museum was a cat called Mike. For some twenty years, Mike made it his home and his friend was a most irregular Egyptologist, Wallis Budge, a freebooting fieldworker and smuggler of antiquities. It was a time when the wildest spiritualist...

It is 1953 in southern England, the time of the Coronation, and Jack is a small boy from the poor end of the village who is trying desperately to understand the strange people he has been born into. After the gritty, state-regulated austerity of the war, it is supposed to be a time for the celebration...

Most people agree that the world should be just but that it simply isn't. Rogues flourish, the good die young and many feel they have not received their due. Unlike the rest of us, the anonymous hero of Even does not just complain about it, he embarks on a voyage of self-discovery, searching both...

In 1942 Japanese-occupied Singapore, where violence and starvation stalk the streets, a bizarre tranquillity reigns between warring nations in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. This sensitive and humorous work of historical fiction explores a real, and complicated, chapter of Singapore's history in which...

A man stands trial for a brutal murder, a crucial witness disappears, an MP's daughter confronts a dark family secret and an Asian assassin with a passion for Tom and Jerry cartoons inflicts hideous deaths on those who cannot answer his single question. Welcome to the world of Hatewave where the World Wide Web harnesses hate to bring death and destruction to its chosen targets.

Sir James Brooke was an extraordinary 'eminent' Victorian, whose life was the stuff of legend.His curious career began in 1841 when he was caught up in a war in Brunei which had started because a party of local Dayaks had refused to furl their umbrellas in the presence of the Sultan. Brooke was an...

Many men dream of running away to a tropical island and living surrounded by beauty and exotic exuberance. Walter Spies did more than dream. He actually did it. In the 1920s and 30s, Walter Spies — ethnographer, choreographer, film maker, natural historian and painter — transformed the perception...

Rogue Raider is a humorous fictionalized history set in Southeast Asia during the First World War, which centers on a lovable rogue in the form of Captain Julius Lauterbach of the German Imperial Navy and the ship that catapulted the "Flashmanesque" Lauterbach to accidental fame (and infamy), His Imperial...