Paul Spencer Sochaczewski

Happy Birthday Thomas Barbour

Posted on 08. Aug, 2025 by Paul Sochaczewski in Books

Happy Birthday Thomas Barbour When writing about historical characters, scholars search letters, journals, media accounts, and personal memories for the holy grail that “proves” a speculation about events and motivations. From these sources, historians then evaluate and triangulate until, like Miss Marple, they reach a satisfactory solution to the puzzle. (Or as […]

Happy World Rainforest Day – June 22

Posted on 29. Aug, 2025 by Paul Sochaczewski in Environment EarthLove

Happy World Rainforest Day – June 22 Rema and Olivia were like pit bulls that refused to let go of the prey in their mouths. Few things are as hard to dislodge as a belief that you have repeated to yourself over and over. The psychologists call this embedment. When we invest energy […]

Intro to a speculative biography of Ali

Posted on 29. Aug, 2025 by Paul Sochaczewski in Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali

My speculative biography of Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace’s assistant, was honored as the Best Historical Book of 2024 by the United States Peace Corps Writers. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction. Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird Intro to a speculative biography of Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace’s assistant in the Malay Archipelago […]

Lightning Teeth Help Win a Lover’s Heart and Guarantee an Election Victory

Posted on 29. Aug, 2025 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles

SAN ANTONIO, Siquijor Island, The Philippines

What a wonderful world we live in, I thought. For just ten dollars I could buy a small bottle crammed with a magical potion made out of herbs and scrapings of “lightning teeth.”  According to Juan Ponce, the elderly traditional healer who created the concoction, the mystical brew will help the bearer entice new lovers. Enjoy business prosperity. Even win a gubernatorial election.

Alfred Russel Wallace and Things That Go Bump in the Night

Posted on 06. Feb, 2025 by Paul Sochaczewski in Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali, Articles

Alfred Russel Wallace is best known for his scientific achievements — collecting and documenting hundreds of new species of “natural productions,” major insights into biogeography, island endemism, and cultural anthropology, and notably, his development of a theory of evolution by natural selection independently of and prior to that of Charles Darwin.  But Wallace was also […]

Quests: Last Shaman of Sarawak

Posted on 15. Sep, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles

  THE ALMOST LAST SHAMAN It’s been a good ride, but Borneo healer doesn’t expect many others to follow his path.  SERUBAH ULU, Sarawak, Malaysia  To the untrained eye he seems an unlikely magician.  Frail, but with a hundred-watt smile. He has two wispy whiskers, short grey hair, and he walks a bit slowly.  […]

Searching for Orwell

Posted on 25. Jun, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles, Curious Travel

There are worse travel strategies than to visit places with evocative names.

There’s Timbuktu, Congo, and Okavango in Africa; and Salvador de Bahia, Darien, and Patagonia in Latin America, names which purr with history and poetry. 

But Asia’s resonant place names beckon to me above all others.  There’s Sumatra, Java, and Borneo; Malacca, Vientiane, and Makassar; Kelantan, Kathmandu, and Ayudhya.  Not to mention the rivers: Ganges and Yangtze, Mahakam and Mekong. And the one I was headed towards: Ayeyarwady.

My destination was Katha, a small town on the  Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River, which has achieved a modicum of recognition.  It was here, between 1926 and 1927, that a British policeman named Eric Blair spent six months as one of 90 British police officers in Burma.  Eric Blair, who subsequently took the pen name George Orwell, based his 1934 novel Burmese Days on a fictionalized version of Katha that he dubbed Kyauktada (which is derived from the name of a district in Rangoon). 

Quests

Posted on 10. Jun, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Books

Quests is a volume of 24 personal adventures pursued over more than 50 years— at times obscure, long-gestating, sentimental, and ridiculous.

Quests don’t have to be cinematic or physical. A quest might be as seemingly low-key as getting a degree, eating escargots in Paris, learning a language, or mastering the art of making puff pastry.

I will never climb K2 or windsurf across the Atlantic. I don’t intend to attempt to “discover” an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, locate the source of the Nile, or find the Holy Grail.

I’d like to know what quests you’ve chosen. Big or small? Distant or close to home? Did you achieve your goal? If not, does it matter?

Uncle Joe and Aunt Anisoara

Posted on 10. Jun, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles

My uncle and aunt’s love affair illustrates the challenges of trying to decipher a relationship.

How could I not love an uncle who, when he babysat me, let me stay up well past my bedtime to watch wrestling (Antonino Rocca was my favorite) and horror movies (Boris Karloff’s The Mummy was the scariest)? How could I not love an uncle who lived in the middle of Greenwich Village, who took me to my first Broadway show, who tried to disprove Einstein? How could I not love an uncle who invented a slew of often-useless gadgets, and who chastised major corporations for their lousy ad campaigns — and then offered them new campaigns that were hardly better? How could I not love an uncle who married a wannabe Romanian noble and bought a farm in the middle of the Adirondack mountains because it resembled his wife’s native Transylvania?

Uncle Joe Rubin died of colon cancer in 1960 when I was 13. I was at an age when I was particularly incurious about life’s complexities and more than a little spooked by having a close family member wither away in our spare room.

Quests

Posted on 15. Sep, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles

Consider the great cultural and religious myths — the Mahabharata, Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Faust, the Divine Comedy, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, the Odyssey, the Ring cycle — which feature a hero (I’m using the term to encompass men and women) who undertakes a journey to uncover a mystery, right a wrong, seek fame or fortune or happiness.

Now think of the classic films — Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, Die Hard, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind — which explore similar “searching-for” dynamics.

Philosopher Joseph Campbell called these archetypal scenarios the Hero’s Journey. And I suggest they are as important to you and me as they are to Luke Skywalker or Dorothy from Kansas.

The Real First White Rajah of Borneo

Posted on 15. Sep, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles, Sultan and the Mermaid Queen

I belong to a small group of people curious about the life and times of Alexander Hare. When we get together, we ponder an improbable question: How did an ambitious 19th-century slave-owner, harem-builder, and political arriviste become the First White Rajah of Borneo?

The bigger question: How does one become king or queen numero uno? More specifically, how might I become the first Supreme Leader With Wisdom Like Solomon Whose Eyes Spot Prey Like an Eagle and Whose Courage Rivals That of a Tiger of my own country?

Borneo Tree Spirits Go to Court

Posted on 12. Mar, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles, Environment

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia

“Your honor, I call our ethno-witnesses.” At a signal from Andrew Ajang Mering twelve men and women stood, hesitatingly.

The chief justice, a bemused ethnic-Indian Malaysian named Samuel Aithihyamala, stared over his half-glasses at the plaintiff’s lawyer, Andrew Ajang Mering, then at the large group of men and women who had just risen. “Just how many witnesses do you have, Mister Mering?”

“One for each of the large old-growth trees in the Penan homeland,” Andrew Mering answered. “We’re not sure of the precise number, but probably in the region of six thousand.”

“You’re planning to call approximately six thousand witnesses?”

“No, your honor.  That might challenge the patience of the court. I’ll keep the number down to a dozen.”

To Cut That Tree, Cut Through Me

Posted on 22. Feb, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles, Environment

Any new-age nature-lover can hug a tree, and many do. But it takes a special kind of person to embrace a tree that is about to be chopped down and to dare the woodsman: “If you want to cut the tree, you’ll have to cut through me.”

The Chipko movement in north India was founded on this kind of challenge.

I met Srimati Bali Devi Rana, a leader of this unstructured movement, at her 210-person village of Reiny, about an hour north of the Indian hill station of Joshimath, in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Sitting on the roof of her two story-house, with hay drying at our feet and tall peaks just a few kilometers away, she welcomed me with glasses of cold, clear water, tea and homemade nibbles made of corn flakes, peanuts, and masala. Srimati, an animated woman wearing an orange woolen head scarf and homespun jacket and shirt, ran me through the historical origins of the movement.

The Great Plastic Straw Diversion

Posted on 15. Feb, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Articles, Environment

Starting in 2018, in the Unted States, anti-plastic campaigners encouraged people to make their voices heard to stop companies from using disposable plastic straws. One estimate was that as many as 8.34 billion plastic straws pollute the world’s beaches. That sounds like an enormous amount, but of the eight million tons of plastic that flows into the ocean each year, plastic straws comprise just 0.025 percent, a drop in the ocean, as it were.

The eco-sipping campaign was wildly successful. The city of Seattle banned plastic straws. Starbucks, McDonald’s, and dozens of other companies phased out plastic straws and stirrers.

What can we learn from these plastic-related initiatives?

Enhancing the Narrative

Posted on 01. Jan, 2024 by Paul Sochaczewski in Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali, Articles

A historian quickly learns there is little absolute truth.  The authors of personal memoirs and observer narratives enhance, misremember (sometimes deliberately), censor, and leave out chunks of information.

Rarely, though, do historians try to go beyond the facts and speculate on the emotions, intentions, and psychological motivations of their research subjects.

As a fun exercise, I’ve created several “imagined conversations” between Alfred Russel Wallace and his assistant Ali, based on tidbits of information and provocative clues found in Wallace’s narratives.