Sidharta Books & Print

Paul Spencer Sochaczewski has spent more than 30 years on the conservation front lines. Born in Brooklyn, New York, raised in northern New Jersey, graduated from George Washington University, he served in the Peace Corps for two years in remote parts of Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, and was creative director of J. Walter Thompson advertising affiliates in Singapore and Indonesia for another ten. He ran World Wildlife Fund International’s global public awareness campaigns to protect tropical rainforests and biodiversity and is now a consultant for IUCN-the World Conservation Union and the International Osteoporosis Foundation. While on sabbatical in Hawaii in 1992, Paul changed his family name from Wachtel to the original vowel-challenged name of his Polish-born father. He is co-author, with Jeff McNeely, of Soul of the Tiger: Searching for Nature’s Answers in Southeast Asia (Doubleday, Paragon, Oxford University Press, University of Hawaii Press, Shinkosha) and EcoBluff Your Way to Instant Environmental Credibility (Bonus Books). Lyall Watson, author of Supernature, said Soul of the Tiger is 'a timely, revealing, delightful, and yet totally unsentimental look at the relationship between our own and other species which must lie at the heart of all successful conservation.' Kirkus Reviews called the book '…a rich exotic kettle of myths, origin tales, ritual dances, blood spots, natural-historical oddities, human-animal soul transfers and transformations…a lush eco-cultural travelogue of myth and ritual…

'He has written more than 500 by-lined articles for the International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Geographical, International Wildlife, BBC Wildlife, Earth Times, E: The Environmental Magazine, GQ Active and many other publications, and is on the editorial advisory board of the Indonesian Heritage Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Malaysia (Archipelago Press). He lives in a small village in Switzerland.