The Most Offending Soul Alive: The Life of Tom Harrisson

English cultural anthropologist Tom Harrisson (1911-1976) was ""a romantic polymath, a drunken bully, an original-thinking iconoclast, a dreadful husband and father, a fearless adventurer, a Richard Burton of his time,"" writes Heimann, a U.S. diplomat who first met Harrisson in Borneo. Harrisson's adventures living among cannibals in New Hebrides led to his 1937 bestseller, Savage Civilization, which portrayed the natives not as benighted primitives, but as full human beings exploited by white colonialists. In the late 1930s, Harrisson cofounded Mass-Observation, an opinion-gathering outfit that surveyed the everyday behavior and attitudes of ordinary British citizens and gave the British government vital feedback about public responses to the war against Nazi Germany. In 1945, British Army Major Harrisson commanded seven fellow Special Operations agents who parachuted into Borneo behind Japanese lines; he recruited guerrillas, set up an intelligence network before Allied landings and raised an army of blow-piping Dayak headhunters who killed or captured 1500 Japanese. Heimann's mesmerizing account of Harrisson's wartime exploits reads like an international thriller. As postwar curator of Borneo's Sarawak Museum, Harrisson pioneered conservation of the (still-endangered) green sea turtle, an edible creature found in all warm oceans, and founded the first orphanage for infant orangutans. Heimann squarely confronts Harrisson's dark side; hot-tempered, arrogant, hard drinking, with a lifelong penchant for making enemies, he ""married once, probably twice for money"" and virtually abandoned his schizophrenic son. But as a protector of, and advocate for, indigenous peoples, at odds with traditional anthropologists, Harrisson emerges in this engrossing bio as a forerunner of the contemporary movement to preserve local cultures and ecosystems. Photos. (Dec.)