Linda Spalding Books In Order

Novels

  1. Daughters of Captain Cook (1989)
  2. The Paper Wife (1994)
  3. Mere (2001)
  4. The Purchase (2012)
  5. A Reckoning (2017)

Non fiction

  1. The Brick Reader (1991)
  2. The Follow (1998)
  3. A Dark Place in the Jungle (1999)
  4. Riska (2000)
  5. Lost Classics (2000)
  6. Who Named the Knife (2006)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Linda Spalding Books Overview

A Dark Place in the Jungle

In A Dark Place in the Jungle, writer Linda Spalding travels to Borneo’s threatened jungles on the trail of orangutan researcher Birute galdikas. What she finds is an unholy mix of foreign scientists, government workers, tourists, loggers, descendants of Dayak headhunters, Javanese gold miners, and half tame orangutans. Galdikas, along with Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. Formed the famed trio of ‘angels’ Louis Leakey encouraged to study great apes in the wild In 1971, she went into the jungle to study orangutans and decades later emerged with a rundown empire crumbling around her. Along the way, as poachers and timber barons slaughtered orangutans by the hundreds, Galdikas evolved into Ibu, the great mother of orphan orangutans, blurring the line between ape and human, tourist and scientist, Eden and everything else. To the orangutans, this was perhaps the cruelest blow of all. Spalding’s quest takes her from the offices of Galdika’s foundation in Los Angeles to the crocodile infested Sekonyer River in Borneo, where she confronts the sad, corrupting failure of a woman trying desperately to mother a species to survival; the dangers and temptations of ecotourism; and the arrogance of the human inclination to alter the things we set out to save. Here is a book that shows us no paradise is safe from the machinations of man, and no one immune to temptation.

Riska

Books by Western specialists have compiled many observations and facts about the ‘headhunters of Borneo,’ but the culture has never before been described from the inside, by an indigenous person born and reared in the rain forest listening to the stories and legends of her tribe. In this vivid memoir, Riska Orpa Sari tells us about the remote village of her birth, where rice is cultivated by cutting and burning the rain forest, where hunting and gathering take place under its dark canopy. She describes courtship and marriage, funeral rites, the sound headhunters make before they strike, the impact of the logging industry on the Dayak way of life, and the centrality of the river to all aspects of daily living. As Riska‘s marvelous story unfolds, a witty, intelligent personality is revealed, endearing, resilient, and dedicated to the preservation of her people.

Lost Classics

An Anchor Books OriginalSeventy four distinguished writers tell personal tales of books loved and lost great books overlooked, under read, out of print, stolen, scorned, extinct, or otherwise out of commission. Compiled by the editors of Brick: A Literary Magazine, Lost Classics is a reader’s delight: an intriguing and entertaining collection of eulogies for lost books. As the editors have written in a joint introduction to the book, being lovers of books, we ve pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory. Anyone who has ever been changed by a book will find kindred spirits in the pages of Lost Classics. Each of the editors has contributed a lost book essay to this collection, including Michael Ondaatje on Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara s Bringing Tony Home, a novella about a mutual era of childhood. Also included are Margaret Atwood on sex and death in the scandalous Doctor Glas, first published in Sweden in 1905; Russell Banks on the off beat travelogue Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene the slightly ditzy cousin of Graham; Bill Richardson on a children s book for adults by Russell Hoban; Ronald Wright on William Golding s Pincher Martin; Caryl Phillips on Michael Mac Liammoir s account of his experiences on the set of Orson Welles s Othello, and much, much more.

Who Named the Knife

Murder. Hawaii’s beautiful Hanauma Bay. The suspects: two young mainlanders on their honeymoon. Maryann Acker, a pretty young Mormon woman, is eighteen. William, just out of prison, is twenty eight. The crime is robbery, ending in a killing.

In 1982, Linda Spalding, a mainlander herself, living in Hawaii, is chosen as a juror for Maryann s trial there. Surprisingly the chief witness against Maryann is William, accusing her of shooting their victim. Spalding has reasonable doubts, but on the last day of the trial, she is abruptly dismissed from the jury, and Maryann found guilty.

Who Named the Knife is the story of how, eighteen years later, Spalding stumbles over the journal she kept during the trial, and reading it carefully, wonders if she right to have those doubts. She tracks down Maryann, who is still incarcerated, starts a correspondence, and begins to uncover much more than the answer to the question of Maryann s guilt or innocence. There s the bold new friendship frustrated by monitored visits, hard to make phone calls, and the dehumanizing results of years in prison. But as her understanding of the forces that drove Maryann s actions grows, Spalding finds herself compelled to examine her own past as well as Maryann s.

Who Named the Knife
is a record of this complex journey a journey into America s troubled soul and into the twists of fate that spin two lives down different but infinitely painful paths. The story is Maryann s but it is also Spalding s, as subject and writer overlap, and the hunt for truth unmasks family mysteries. Lyrical and achingly honest, this is a story that offers us profound insight onto the vagaries of the human heart.

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