Having read Tales of the South Pacific, one of the classics of 20th Century literature, I couldn't wait to read this 'sequel' by Michener. I wished I hadn't bothered. It seemed as if the great wordsmith was just writing because his publisher demanded to cash in on the success of 'Tales'. Disappointed, I put it down about a third of the way through and never bothered to pick it up again. It takes two to tango - even in a novel. Michener (the author) and I (the reader)danced our way through 'Tales' never missing a step. With the sequel it was if we had two left feet.

The pieces on Fijian-Indians in 'Fiji' and 'The Mynah Birds', in which local Indians are shown up in an ugly and racist manner, are just bad writing. To his credit Michener apologised about his untoward remarks years after the publication of the book.

I loved this book. While reading Tales of the South Pacific, I was interested in the island cultures which played behind the main stories. This book delves into those cultures, as they were when the book was written. Nice stories.

My Aussie husband (before he was my husband) planned to return to Australia for a year to finish his degree. I had planned to go as well so I purchased this and other books to help me get an Australian work permit, etc. Six months before I was due to leave I sent away over 30 letters requesting LEGAL work in Australia. After I read the book I was confident I would be able to obtain a work permit; six months later I was confident I'd wasted my money. Unless you are Bill Gates or the like, overseas companies just don't want the hassle of hiring an American. You would probably be better off looking for cash-in-hand jobs once you get there.

The book has a lot of pertinent information and covers a lot of issues, from relocating (including pets) to finding work to finding housing. As it was written specifically for residents of the UK migrating to Australia or NZ, some of the information is not relevant to US-based readers, which was disappointing for me. Also, the edition I read in early 1998 had house prices from 1994, and the prices I've noted while doing some of my own research recently are much higher. All in all, however, quite detailed and descriptive of all the things one needs to think about if migrating "down under."

To my mind, this volume treats too many topics to permit a meaningful discussion of any of them. The result is a discursive discussion supported by very selective use of examples. There is no systematic overview of the material culture of any of the areas discussed, and there is only a loose connection between the narrative and the illustrations. The book might have been greatly improved by a more detailed discussion of the geographic and demographic background of the area(s) to be treated, together with a more systematic treatment of the extent material cultural of each area or the region in general. As it is, the chapters seem to have no clear beginning or end. They leave you wondering how what you've seen fits into the bigger picture of the artistic output of the area and oceanic art in general.

To be fair, however, this may not be the fault of the author. This is a tough topic to treat in a book of this length, intended for a general audience. The publisher might have done better to break the topic up into separate volumes.

In his book Oceanic Art, Nicholas Thomas goes beyond the eye's view of the artwork produced from Oceania, giving the reader the background information and reasons why the distinct works of art were created. Thomas goes through each culture, giving and explaining examples to match the history of each respective culture. I was impressed by the thoroughness of Thomas, not only showing ancient artwork, but photos from Oceania today, as the respective cultures are being preserved. His analysis of the artwork was very well done as he not only explains the artwork, but gives the reader a sense of the culture also. Having studied art, I was impressed with all the examples and pictures in the book, then relating art with history. I would highly suggest this insightful book.

This book seems to be to be a mock-up that accidentally got bound and sold before it had a chance to be edited by either the author or the publisher. It is filled with typos--English, not Polish, which I am not qualified to judge; contradictory dates; phrases, such as "Golden Freedoms," repeated but never explained; map borders overlaid on one another so it is impossible to see what's going on; legends missing on the maps. As a result, I am leery of its historical and geographical accuracy too, and feel I will have to double and triple check it against other sources before I can trust it.

From my experience, it has been very hard to get a good Polish history text. However, in this case, Pogonowski comes up with a very helpful format by providing some historical text followed by numerous large maps showing that historical activity. This book is very useful if you are reading accounts of Polish history -- or even a Sienkiewicz novel -- and need to see the CONTEMPORARY map so that you can associate the history or story with the ever-changing map of Poland and the Polish Commonwealth. - I like what the author did. It's very useful. And I recommend the book highly as an auxiliary reading tool.

I bought this book because I am interested in the early explorers and travellers in to the Australian hinterland and because I was about to travel to some of the same areas the author had visited. I found the bits about Todd, the man who came to Australia to look at the stars and ended up connecting Australia to the outside world by a telegraph wire, quite interesting. Although I thought perhaps Alice Thomson was a bit confused as to whether the story was about Alice Todd (the great grandmother for whom she was named) or Charles Todd who laid the line. And I could see where she was coming from in trying to relate the story of her own travels with her husband in the same area and the Todds adventures. But again I'm not sure she pulled it off exactly. By exaggerating her own hardships, she underplayed the genuine difficulties the Todds endured and both stories lost credibility - for me, anyway. But what I really disliked about this book was its horrid comments about Australians and the way they live, in these so-called remote areas. She makes it sound as though one hour out of Adelaide she was alone in the world with people almost unrecognisable as human beings. Spare us the "don't come the raw prawn", "strewth cobber" cliches (which are always only used by the English, anyway). And I hope she feels ashamed at the way she treated people who went out of their way to help her, for a few cheap laughs. In great frustration (it was so nearly a good book) I eventually threw it on the campfire, unfinished, at Lake Eyre, halfway along the Singing Line.

I was fortunate enough to have the chance to live in Melbourne Australia for more than three years. I have experienced large parts of the journey Alice and her husband undertake in their quest to better understand her ancestor's experiences in creating the first telegraph line across Australia.

I found the book to be very Alice Thomson-centric. She seems to glorify all aspects of her journey while continually placing Charles Todd higher and higher upon his pedestal. I was hoping she would rekindle some of my own memories of the Australia outback. However, Ms. Thomson invariably spends paragraph after paragraph describing her husband's illness or her own tiny adventures driving the Land Cruiser or walking around Coober Pedy. Her descriptions of the local towns and environs is terse, quick, and dull. I do not recommend this book to anyone except Alice Thomson and her immediate family.

This was truly an amazing book. The author involves you in the very foundations that build up the Australian telegraph system - you become part of the history as she takes you through the life of her great-great-grandmother and grandfather. It reveals, once again, how many people gave up so much so that we can have a secure foundation in our society. Well worth owning.

Adventuring in New Zealand turns out to be a fairly pedestrian travel guide, with little to recommend it. While claiming to be an "adventuring guide", there's little more about hiking, parks, fishing, climbing, etc. than any of the standard guidebooks. Design, illustrations, and indexing are second rate. Give this one a miss.

Well, I'm always sorry when I need to write a negative review about the book - even more if the book is about the rail travel (perhaps books from Trailblazer spoiled me to much). Anyway, based on Amazon prediction that similar title "Australia by rail" from Trailblazer (by the same author, Colin Taylor) is soon to be published (January 2001) I postponed for awhile the decision to order this book. At the end I ordered this one because my deadline to departure was coming close and Trailblazer version was not published yet. Compared with Trailblazer rail guides this one was more or less useless during my preparation of itinerary for a trip from Perth to Cairns. There is way to much information on itineraries prepared by the author which are suitable only for those people willing to spend almost all vacation time on the train. Do you know anyone? I don't. Author included some very basic information and recommendation about the cities, sightseeing's, walks...but without some clear organization. You'll definitely need another, better organized guide to get some basic travel information about Australia or New Zealand.
I really hope that author will rewrite and most importantly reorganize the content for Trailblazer version of the guide because it would be pity not to share his vast travel experience with others.

While the Natural History Section of this Book is fine, with modest detail on the plants and animals, the book goes down hill when it get to History and Land Use Issues. The author seems extremely vindictive against the Mountain Cattlemen of Victoria, perhap a reflection of her battles with them as a member of the Victoria National Parks Association. Her bias shows up in many ways, such as those that agree with her are "caring" or "enlightened", those against her are "uninformed" or "greedy." Then again it seems the only self interested parties in the land use conflicts, in her view, are the Cattlemen (especially) and the loggers, but never the Greens, which is baloney of the first order. In total the book could have done better by sticking to the natural history aspect and steering clear of controversy.

This 372-page hardback consisting of 10 chapters totalling 286 pages, two appendices of 24 and 46 pages respectively, a lengthy bibliography and a good index, is an attempt at reconstituting the prehistory of Polynesian migration to Easter Island in the light of the evidence from a modern indigenous manuscript ("Manuscript E") of uncertain authorship, reproduced in full in the second appendix, pp. 304-356, the first mention of which dates only from 1954 or 1955. Its translation, alas, instead of being presented with the original text, is scattered, piecemeal, throughout the diverse chapters of the book, so that only the most dedicated reader will likely go through the immensely time-consuming task of verifying it. This is all the more galling that, in many places, Barthel himself marks his own translation as doubtful (?). Evidence is drawn from other sources, sometimes without any translation at all (viz p.150, six verses, pp. 76 to 92: eighty-four verses without a single translation!), or with only partial translations (viz p.146, five verses, only two translated), or some in Spanish, without any English (viz p.196, fourteen verses with only a Spanish translation). Even the opening, p. vi, consisting of 10 verses (evaru kainga / etahi i ravaa...), is only accompanied by a German translation! Barthel's interpretations are thus, for all practical purposes, unverifiable by any but the most dedicated and knowledgeable reader with a great deal of time to spare. Or should I say waste? Indeed, in the last chapter, Barthel derives from Manuscript E the exact dates of Hotu Matua's migration to Easter Island: departure from Hiva on April 25, arrival at Rano Kau on June 10, arrival at Anakena on July 23, etc. Those dates are calculated as if there were a regular correspondence between the ancient Easter Island calendar and ours, valid year in, year out. But there can be no such correspondence, because the ancient Easter Island calendar was lunisolar (like the Jewish and ancient Greek ones), with twelve lunar months of 29 or 30 days, and a thirteenth embolismic month inserted about every third year to keep with the seasons. This book is valuable only insofar as it gives the full text of Manuscript E in transcription (a straight photographic reproduction would have been better). Barthel's one seminal, indispensable work - Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift - remains, alas, untranslated.

Lutz writes an eighty page encyclopedia entry, giving you everything you ever wanted to know about this Pacific island, while proving he did not step foot on the island. The photographs seem to be from the 1960's, despite the 1987 book copyright date. The Guamanians are portrayed as backward and overly reliable on the government to cure its ills. Although this site lists this as a kids book, your child will be bored silly.