There are two ways I can describe this book: as an assigned essay on "How I Spent My Vacation," in which it might receive a passing grade in High School; or as a visit by your brother-in-law, the one you never really liked but tolerated for your sister's sake, who shares his superficial ideas as if they were deep insights. I suppose there are people who will voluntarily submit to either, but I'm not one of them. The author (he can only be called a writer in the most literal sense) has no insight to speak of, is manifestly incompetent at background research, and lacks any useful power of description. He really should look up the meanings of words like "masquerade" and "circumvent" before he uses them. . . The real mystery is how something like this ever gets published.

Truman uses words like an artist uses paint to create a colorful masterpiece. He not only gives the reader a deep understanding of Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti's multi-tiered eco-system, but he also captures the souls of the people who call the Islands their home. It's an exotic mix filled with historical and geographical background. "Sunday Islands" is also very, very funny! This is must reading for anyone who's been or plan on visiting these southwest Pacific locales, and if the reader doesn't have an urge to travel, "Sunday Islands" will transport them to the lush Pacific locations he so eloquently describes. One can only hope Truman will write a second edition with illustrations to accompany his vivid description of life "down under".

There are tourists and there are travelers. Both visit other lands, but tourists make no attempt to learn about the people and culture, preferring to view everything from their own perspective. Travelers try to learn as much as possible about the places they visit and appreciate the cultural differences. In "Sunday Islands: New Zealand, Tahiti, Australia," Harold Truman shows that he is a traveler as he offers his impressions of the South Pacific gleaned during visits to the region from 1994 to 2000. Truman is not the stereotypical "ugly American" on his journeys. He never loses the awareness that he is a guest in other people's homeland and is careful to show respect for their customs - even if those customs are totally foreign to Americans. He also shows his sense of humor in recounting his own misadventures, such as his first attempt to use an outrigger canoe and learns it's not as simple as it appears. Even when playing the tourist, Truman remains the traveler. Most tourists going out on a fishing excursion would concentrate on landing a big one, but Truman gets to know the boat's captain, learning more about the country and its people in a few hours of conversation than anyone could learn from reading thousands of travel brochures. Throughout his journeys, Truman demonstrates a keen sense of observation of people and places. Thanks to his narrative, which flows like poetry, and his descriptions of people and places, we are more than readers of his travel journal, we are his friends accompanying him on his journey.

The Novel After January by nick Earl's is set on Quuensland's sunshine coast and teells of a boy's wait till the end of january for his results of school,in order for him to contimplate his future (After January.The story begins with alex ,a boy spending much of his time body boarding at the local beach with little in his life,with a yearn for feminine interaction Alex then begins his quest to find love and finds in a girl with similar intrests in Fortuna who he falls in love with thus for creating the climax and most intresting part of the novel.This long drawn out climax eventually happens a long time into the book and it seems to take forever to happen.Earl's vast characteristaion eventaully does little to the atmosphere eventaully resulting in a poorly constructed book of which the plot has had not enough developement.Earls attempts to write in the proverbial 'thoughts on paper' genre has liitle impact and the talent is one that takes much more talent to perfect than what is illustrated thoughout the novel.Igive the book two stars only due to the fact that their is a climax even though it only lasts for perhaps two of the books very small chapters.I suggest that if youy can read this you must be very patient and enjoy reading novels of liitle substance or personality.To Nick Earls I suggest he spends more time at the drawing board when writing the next book,to avoid creating a book that is even more dismal that this effort.

In this book Nick Earls has done much to combat the notion that young love is immature love, that it is only for the bold or brash at heart, and most of all that it is based almost soley on physical contact. Earls' main character, Alex, is waiting for his High School grades to come out, waiting to see whether he's scored a university position. He's at the beach house trying to distract himself from the anxiety inherent in the wait, by bodysurfing and watching cricket on TV. Then comes F (we aren't told her full name until later in the book), who surfs into Alex's life and upsets all his plans for an uneventful couple of weeks. Not that he's complaining... Earls uses the first-person present tense device very well indeed, and the book left me feeling a little breathless by the end of it, just like when I first fell in love as a youngster. And if a book can rouse old emotions in that way, then the writer must have achieved something great.

This is another guide written in the same sort of format as Lets Go and Lonely Planet. It is a lot thicker than the Lets Go version and believe me, weight and space are important when lugging the thing around a whole continent. Let's Go also has a fair bit more information than Rough Guide in fewer pages. I also don't like the paper the pages are made of in this book as it's not a nice texture, is very thin and the pages stick together when the book's been inside a hot backpack and just don't feel nice turning the pages when it's a bit humid. Rough Guide is also rather opinionated on everything from each hostel to local information booth staff friendliness. I must say I do agree with some comments but a lot I never had the same experiences. That's the thing about travelling one person can have a great experience with a tourism operator and the next not so good. It depends who else is on the tour, in the room, which staff member you get and so on. If this was a constantly updated website that encourages feedback and changed the information regularly than I would see a place for it but not in a guide book. If you follow the author's opinion you'll miss out on some great experiences and even the places he recommends you may still have a bad time at. That's just the way tourism is. I'd recommend Lets Go over this for backpacking around Australia.

This book was a lifesaver for us on our three week vacation to Australia. The maps within it were fantastic especially on our four day drive up the coast. It was very helpful with regard to accommodation, and finding tourist information offices. We didn't leave our room without it on any day of our trip.

The sub-title "Myths and Wonders . . " is a misnomer. Unless you count the author's apparent fascination with celebrities, I did not find many myths. Any island that has movie stars as frequent visitors, or has actually had a film made there is, by default, high in the author's estimation.

The production quality of the book far exceeds the content. The photos are brilliantly reproduced, with deep blues and greens of the ocean, and nice aerials of many islands. The content of the photos, however, is very inconsistent from region to region. Some geographic areas have a nice mix of landscape and cultural shots, while others are only a series of aerial prints (nice but not sufficient.) In the "Tonga" section, we read of an interesting royal burial ground consisting of numerous pyramids, but only see a dozen photos of the island from a distance.

The editing and translation can be blamed for the frustration in reading the books. One of the more annoying layout aspects it's the placement of the photo captions. No effort seems to have been made to place them near the pictures they describe. The captions are also written in an inconsistent mix of broken sentences, quotes from the text and irrelevant facts - in many cases not even describing the photo's content.

There are several errors in distances and heights of mountains, which can be ascribed to conversion during the translation process; mountains are described as "5,456 feet (1,723 feet)" in height.

There are references to "mass" for individuals attending a protestant church service. In describing the "Bounty" mutineers' arrival on Pitcairn Island, the ship is said to have wandered the seas for "years" while the dates given only cover a few months.

So, in summary, the book is not what it claims to be, though it does have pretty pictures.

I was given this book as a gift and it is a wonderful book, both for its amazing photography and narrative. I highly recommend it!

Easter Island is one of the most interesting places in the world, but you would never know it from this text that is so much like geography textbooks of old that you don't want to even turn the page. What does keep you turning the pages are the pictures which are quite beautiful and, in themselves, illuminating... A worthy effort, with solid information...

An excellent informational book about Easter Island and its mysterious past. Schort chapters break the book into easily managable sections. The vocabulary is appropriate for the intended age group. Factual information is clearly separated from theories. When applicable, multiple theories are presented. Crisp, clear photographs throughout the book serve to clarify the narration. A glossary, complete with pronounciation guide, is included along with an index.

It was a good book about an overview of Maldives but did not focus much on the interior travel within Maldives and getting around its myriad of islands

There are four main tour books for the Maldives, and this one is a good place to start. (Another good one is the Michelin guide.) This book gives a general overview of the islands and many of the resorts. Divers will want the Divers' Guide to the Maldives to fill out the information here.

If you want to know every detail about diplomatic efforts and negotiations surrounding Las Malvinas (Falkland Islands) conflict, this is the right book. But if you are a hard core military history reader, this is not the book for you. The narrative doesn't have the magic to make you feel like you were there. It doesn't trigger the movie in your mind. There are no personal accounts of the soldiers who took part in the action. How they felt, what they saw and what they did. It doesn't have the details of the offensive and defensive actions for the battles. If you have read the books of Stephen E. Ambrose, you will understand what I'm talking about.

This book tells the history of the Malvinas Battle of 1982 between Argentina and Great Britain. The tale of what happened in Buenos Aires, London, Washington and New York as the conflict unfolded is very interesting. Must be read by anyone who wants to have a clear understanding of the Battle and of the political motives behind the actors (Argentina's military junta, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and the Reagan Administration).

I, too, found this book to be a plodding bore. I did finally manage to get all the way through, but it took months of effort (got to get back to it--after all, I paid good money for it!). Way too scholarly for any except the most masochistic. Re-read "Mutiny on the Bounty" -- maybe not the historical accuracy wanted, but a wonderful read none-the-less!

Social theorists have tried many definitions of human nature: human beings are the animals that make tools, that laugh, that play. I have another: Human-beings are history-makers. We eternally make our present by looking backwards. We present ourselves by expressing a significant past. To know us in our history is to know who we are. -Greg Dening (Performances)

At 4:30 A.M. on April 28, 1789 a series of events began which has ever since held a grip on Western imagination. Fletcher Christian lead a mutiny against Captain William Bligh aboard HMS Bounty. The aftermath of this rebellion included: Bligh's remarkable 4,000 mile journey with 18 loyal crewmen in an open launch; the sinking of HMS Pandora, which had been sent out to arrest the mutineers, with a loss of 34 men, including 4 of the Bounty crew; and the establishment of a weird sort of tropical commune on Pitcairn's Island by Christian and eight other men along with the Tahitian women (and a few friends and progeny) who may or may not have been the precipitating cause of the whole fiasco. Eventually Bligh would return to sea, three of the mutineers would be returned to England and hanged and all but one of the men on Pitcairn's Island would be murdered or die of disease.

Now there's obviously enough material there to justify the boatload of Bounty books, plays and movies that have poured forth in a steady stream over the past two centuries, but what Professor Dening has uniquely done is to consider the uses to which the story has been put over those years. He makes the convincing argument that Captain Bligh, contrary to popular imagery, was not particularly abusive of his men. Indeed, the title of the book is reflective of Dening's position that Bligh was mostly despised for the harsh language he used in upbraiding men, not for any physical measures nor for the quality of his command in general. Having made his case, Dening moves on to a consideration of why our historical understanding of Bligh requires that he be seen as an ogre. If the "reality" is that he was a fairly mild captain for his time, why do we, looking backward, see him as the very embodiment of tyrannical authority? Why are Christian and his cohorts seen as heroes, virtual freedom fighters?

The book is wide ranging, learned, entertaining and thought provoking, but its best feature is the balance that Dening strikes between the effort to present the story of the Bounty as ethnographic history ("an attempt to represent the past as it was actually experienced") and the realization that:

a historical fact is not what happened but that small part of what has happened that has been used by historians to talk about, History is not the past: it is a consciousness of the past used for present purposes.

Everyone who has ever been subjected to a history course in the modern university is familiar with the obsession with primary sources, the Left dictatorship which controls academia insists that the "truth" is to be found in the pamphlets and diaries and letters of the unimportant and the obscure, rather than in the texts and speeches of the great who shaped our understanding of events. Dening, on the other hand, understands that there is a fundamental dichotomy between the way participants experienced historical events and their importance to the society as a whole. In a very real sense, it is simply not important whether Christ was the son of God, whether England ruled the colonies harshly, whether Southerners fought for slavery, whether FDR ended the Depression, whether Nixon subverted the Constitution and Clinton merely lied about sex--what matters is that this is how we perceive these events. In Denings' felicitous phrase: Illusions make things true; truth does not dispel illusion.

GRADE: A-

Dening provides an interesting history of the Bounty story - what makes it different is his focus on the disparity between fact and the fiction that developed surrounding the characters of Christian and Bligh.

I liked the book (I read in twice, in fact), and I was a little put-off by the other online reviews. Maybe the book is, as another reader put it, "scholarly" but I didn't view that as a negative. All books need not be written for the average Joe (and, incidentally, cliometrics can be found in any decent dictionary) - so what's the problem?

The Lost Tribe is an account of a journalists short (2 week) trip into one of Papua New Guinea's more remote areas. The book is descriptively well written, but is also full of inaccuracies caused by the authors lack of knowlege of local languages and of modern Papua New Guinea. The people he descibes may well be highly isolated but as with most of PNG, their names are included in the common role. Had he given imself more time he could have obatined proper maps which reveal the location of the village and the fictitious volcano he descibes. He could also have learnt Pidgin properly which would have been useful in getting himeself out of the situation that arose. What the author doesn't know is that after his departure from Wanakepa those villagers were forced to pay huge compensation for what happened. They would like the author to bare some of the cost. I'm sure this could be arranged through MAF whoom he can contact through the internet.

This was an author I had hoped would deliver something that many travel-writers don't - a sense of the freedom and anguish of the way we once lived, portrayed through the experiences of the living. In review, he largely managed this. But I still felt strangely unsatisfied when finishing the book. A feeling that emerges from the fact that you leave the story without actually knowing all that much about the tribe. You see, in truth this book is more about a series of events along a storyline than an expose of a 'lost' tribe. Of course this has much to do with his difficulties in communicating with the tribe, but nevertheless it is a shame.

I did though feel that this story highlights the gulf still existing in the world across the spectrum of human cultures. It is for the reader to decide (or not) the value in maintaining or trying to close such a gulf, and for whose benefit - ours or theirs. For example, the impact of western religion on such tribes is shown in the book to be thoughtless and combattant in the way it is taught. Perhaps to be expected in the 18th or 19th century, but quite disturbing when it is in the present day.

In conclusion, I think Marriot has done the Liawep justice with this story, but the damage he did during the course of his stay will probably haunt him and the Liawep for many years to come.

It is not often that one finds travel writing elevated to the level of adventure. What's more, Marriott's prose is clear and sincere. Overall, a great read. If you have not got your hand on a good travel book in a while, invest in this one. I'm going out to get the "Savage shore".

As a previous reviewer has mentioned, this book, and others of its ilk, such as works by authors like Barry Fell, is based on the premise that only white people have invented anything complex. I don't think Childress is genuinely racist in motivation, he's just not the brightest of bulbs. The idea that cultures can develop in similar ways without being in contact with one another is a concept too subtle for the likes of Childress, but it doesn't stop him coming up with his usual ill considered opinions.
These books do a great disservice to the people of the Pacific, to scholarship, the past, and just plain honesty. If you want a genuine examination of Pacific prehistory you'd be far better off reading Pat Kirch or Peter Bellwood than wasting your time on Childress' childish scribblings.

Indeed, as other reviewers have also observed, some of the contents of this book come from uncertain sources. Some of its parts are more serious, some less so. But all in all, this book does provide a great insight into the culture and life of ancient Micronesia - and it's one of very few books that accomplish this. It is written in a vivid style, easy to read, serving also as a guidebook to some extent for those visiting the region. For armchair travellers, real travellers, scholars of Micronesia, and others, this is a book I recommend ! Just take it with some caution if you are looking for academic rigour.

It is difficult to find books that include an indepth look at diffusionist theory in Micronesia, or other Pacific Islands, for that matter. Thor Heyerdahl, Barry Fell, and others have proposed that the settlement of the Pacific started in early Egypt. Indeed, did the same people who built the Egyptian pyramids and megaliths build the incredible city of Nan Madol? Childress says that Nan Madol and other megalithic remains in the Pacific were built by the ancient Egyptians. A great theory, and Childress provides a great deal of evidence in the form of photos, maps, and well referenced "facts." Highly recommended for diffusionists and those who study the megalith builders of thousands of years ago.