Savage Harvest by Carl Hoffman
Those who began swarming into the exotic world, however, were not just acquiring inanimate objects, but walking into something else entirely: a potentially dangerous world of spirits who could make them sick or even kill them, of secrets and meanings whose language they didn’t speak, whose symbols they didn’t understand, and where life and death, literally, hung in the balance.
This was half of a good book. I liked the parts that were actually about Rockefeller--not just how he (probably) died, but what he was doing in New Guinea--and the parts that were about the history of the Asmat, and why they (probably) killed and cannibalized Rockefeller, when they previously hadn't any history of doing that to a white person. And Hoffman's explanation of the documents he found, in the Crosier Order and Dutch colonial archives, that prove (again, probably) that Rockefeller didn't drown is interesting.
But too much of the book is Hoffman essentially badgering the locals to c'mon man, just tell me about how your dads ate this dude, and them going LOL nah. I mean it's not hard to understand their reticence. The Asmat are just a single generation removed from ritual warfare, headhunting, and cannibalism. Most of them have been converted to Catholicism*, and they've been made to feel deeply ashamed of their recent past by both the Church and the Indonesian government that now controls them. Plus they understand now, even if they didn't at the time, who exactly the Rockefellers are. They're not going to open up to this white dude just because he buys them some rice and cigarettes.
*Actually it's kind of funny--funny ironic, not funny ha ha--that most of the Asmat are Catholic now. Transubstantiation is sort of ritual cannibalism. And not in a symbolic way, because that wafer is literally the body of Christ. Symbolism is for heathen Episcopalians!