Toby Schneebaum has recently been media-blitzed because of the recent documentary about his life, "Keep the River on Your Right." WILD MAN explores some of the same incendiary themes of that film (and the book it's based on). This wonderfully warm man writes provocatively about what many have felt, but few expressed: that each of us longs for the primal. To read WILD MAN is to glimpse the savage desire within us all.

The movie does nothing to "prove" that either cannibalism or homosexuality were common among the Amerikaeri. Not one of the tribespeople attests either of these phenomena. I am quite sure that the anthropologists who were filmed and challenged the factuality of what even Schneebaum himself does not claim is nonfiction were not included. The real "proof" (disproof) is that the man whom Schneebaum claims to have eaten part of was alive and met by an anthropologist (T. R. Moore) during the late 1960s, more than a decade after Schneebaum's visit. (No one doubts that he was there, but those who know something about other peoples of the area doubt what he wrote about a homosexual idyll and the cannibalism he writes about.)

Schneebaum writes well, but reading all his books show him to be obsessed with primitivist fantasies, which he dates back to seeing a circus "wild man of Borneo."

Managed to see advance press screener of the new documentary based on Tobias Schneebaum's life called Keep the River On Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale - the film was so mesmerizing and Mr. Schneebaum so articulate and intriguing I immediately ordered the original memoir by Schneebaum and read it in one sitting. An important "lost" book from the Sixties thank god restored to it's original importance.

Hawilson's comments (below) reflect a very limited mind. I know Toby Schneebaum, and have no doubt in my mind that this book is, indeed, non-fiction. Schneebaum is in every way a remarkable man. The reader should celebrate the world depicted in this book, not feel threatened by it, thereby dismissing it, as hawilson has done.