Carl Hoffman is an American journalist and author whose work has most recently focused on western fascination with indigenous cultures, especially in New Guinea and Borneo.
Biography
Carl Hoffman is a second generation native of Washington, D.C., a graduate of the District of Columbia public schools. Hoffman is the author of a number of narrative non-fiction books, about his own trips and those of other contemporary travelers and explorers. Hoffman is a former contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler magazine, a former contributing editor at Wired and has published articles in Outside, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventureand many others. Hoffman has traveled to Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, New Guinea, Greenland, Mongolia, Russia, China, Indonesia and more than 75 other countries on assignment
Books
The Last Wild Men of Borneo is a dual biography of a Swiss national and self-styled wild-man, Bruno Manser; and Michael Palmieri, an American prototypical 1960s hippie who settled in Bali and became leading world exporter and expert of primitive art. It explores the theme of Western fascination with primitive cultures and the interplay between them. In Savage Harvest, Hoffman set out to untangle what happened to Michael Clark Rockefeller, the son of New York GovernorNelson Rockefeller, who vanished in 1961. Hoffman learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia and lived in a remote village amid 10,000 square miles of road-less swamp with the Asmat, a tribe of former headhunters and cannibals on the southwest coast of New Guinea. In Lunatic Express, he traveled 50,000 miles around the world on its most dangerous conveyances, including by bus across Afghanistan and through the Gobi desert on a 20-ton propane truck.
Awards and honors
Hoffman has won five Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation and three North American Travel Journalism Awards. The Last Wild Men of Borneo was shortlisted in 2019 for an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Fiction and was a Banff Mountain Book Award finalist. Savage Harvest was a New York Times Editor's Choice, was included in Amazon Editors' Picks for the 100 Best Books of 2014, The Washington Post as one of its 50 notable non-fiction books of the year, it was among the Kirkus Reviews "Best Books" of 2014 and it was shortlisted for the 2015 Edgar Award in the "Best Fact Crime" category. The Lunatic Express was named one of the ten best books of 2010 by the Wall Street Journal.
