On the remote chance that anyone reading this review also actually plans to read this obscure book, I urge you to pay heed to the full title: “The Duke of Puddle Dock. Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles”. The book is far more about the unfocused self-indulgent ramblings and musings of the author, describing his travels in southeast Asia, than it is about the ostensible subject, Sir Stamford Raffles. Keep in mind also that the author is an anthropologist who unapologetically despises the group of Homo sapiens called tourists, with a particular bias against Aussie tourists. The book takes the form of interspersed brief descriptions of Raffles' life and times, similarly brief quotations from Raffles' own writings or those of his contemporaries who knew him, and much more protracted descriptions of Dr. Barley's experiences in trying to find surviving traces of Raffles in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Most of the places the author describes in the book sound interesting, if you can get past all the anthropological observations about the specific inhabitants he encounters or the general cultures he experiences. Sometimes his observations are amusing. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call them witty, as the writer of the book's dust jacket trumpets. For an example of his dry humor, I quote from Chapter 12: Empires of the Imagination. “He held out an arm decorated with a great X of sticking plaster, as in a children's comic. Either scholarship was taken more seriously here than in England or other forces had been in play. I could not remember the last time one of my lectures had ended in a knife fight.” Try never! The author tries hard, almost too hard at times, to portray himself as the objective, non-judgmental observer of the citizens of the countries he visits, while simultaneously exposing himself as highly judgmental toward all visitors except himself.

It was pure stubbornness, and a misbegotten hope that the book would improve, that led me to keep slogging until I finished it. I came away feeling as though I had learned less than nothing useful about Raffles the person, or his life - the little about him that could be gleaned from the book was so scattered both in spacing throughout the text, and in chronology of Raffles' life, that it was confusing more than enlightening. The comparisons between Raffles and Sukarno that dominated a portion of the book seemed forced, a thinly disguised excuse for plopping Barley's observations about Sukarno into the text. And by the end of the book I felt I had learned almost nothing useful about modern southeast Asia either. My rating of 2 stars for this colossal waste of time is only for the flashes of humor to be found in it...truly insufficient reason for anyone to invest their time reading this book. If ever there was a case of a book being over-hyped in descriptions on Amazon and in the book's dust jacket, this is it. ( )