Comments on Wallace’s ‘The Malay Archipelago’

Alfred Russell Wallace spent several years in the 1850s and 1860s killing and collecting specimens in what is now Indonesia and Malaysia for natural-history collections in Europe. In this classic account, he describes and discusses the plants and animals that he finds, how he came upon them, and aspects of their context, and he relates distribution of species to his musings on geology and to the theory of natural selection, which he developed simultaneously to Charles Darwin. In addition, Wallace expresses his fascination with the local “races,” which he categorizes in a high-handed fashion, and with their technologies, which he describes in appreciative detail. Finally, he relates his own adventures, which are numerous, and procedures, which are interesting. Drawings illustrate much of the text. In present-day terms, this long, detailed classic reads much like a magnificent blog.

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Review: Quinn’s ‘Learner’s Dictionary of Today’s Indonesian’

George Quinn’s The Learner’s Dictionary of Today’s Indonesian is a two-way dictionary (Indonesian-English and vice versa). This reference is excellent in many ways, but its lack of comprehensiveness makes it a poor choice as one’s only dictionary. Its main weakness is what I have just signaled: although it does cover a large number of words, it fails to include many basic ones that, for example, the Tuttle Concise Indonesian Dictionary has.

Despite this drawback, I do recommend this dictionary to anyone trying to gain fluency in Indonesian. This is because it contains so much useful information about so many words.