Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught Between Two Worlds

Overview

Sabine Kuegler was five years old when her linguist-missionary parents took her, along with her brother and sister, to live in West Papua, Indonesia. Settling in a thatched hut, cut off from civilization except for a short-wave radio, they lived among the Fayu, a recently discovered Stone Age people, most of whose members had never seen a white person before. A people nearing extinction because of continuous tribal war, the Fayu consider grubs and bats delicacies, kill for revenge, and yet long for a peace they don't know how to achieve.

Editorial Reviews

In 1980, when Kuegler was seven, she accompanied her German linguist parents into the Papuan (New Guinea) jungle to live with the Fayu, a Stone Age tribe of naked people with bones through their noses. She felt immediately at home and by her own account had an idyllic childhood till she was 17, even though the Fayu were split into four mutually hostile subtribes in a culture of "hate, fear and tribal war," where children "knew no security or innocence" and had "little love, no forgiveness and no peace." After years of close friendship with Fayu children, eventually Kuegler was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, had a baby shortly after she graduated, married, divorced, sank into depression and attempted suicide. Young readers, and anthropologists, too, will find this account of a most unusual childhood engrossing and will root for the survival of the Fayu. (Mar. 2)
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Author Information

Bio of Sabine Kuegler

Born in 1972 in Nepal, Sabine Kuegler was five when she came to live in the remote West Papuan jungle. Today she lives near Hamburg, has four children and has started up her own media company.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Grand Central Publishing

Filesize

1.36 MB

Number of Pages

272

eBook ISBN

9780759572720