Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature [Hardcover]

Thor Heyerdahl (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Buccaneer Books (January 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 089966928X
• ISBN-13: 978-0899669281
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,275,128 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thor Heyerdahl's one year adventure in Fatu Hiva, October 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature (Hardcover)

This book is more than just an adventure. It is a young man's awakening to his own ideas, his inspriations and would greatly influence his later travels. It is highly illustrated and higly reccomended. I first read it when I first arrived in my own sailboat many years ago at Hanavae Bay. We read aloud from the book as our boat arrived in Fatu Hiva and we visited all the sites that he mentioned in the book. Yes, they really do exist!

But when I reread the story I am also captivated by the love and devotion of his wife Liv. Imagine she married Thor and for their honeymoon they travel to Fatu Hiva to live in the jungle. Such devotion! This is a great adventure novel for both men and women. I cannot believe that it is out of print for now. His words are as exhilirating now as they were when I first read them years ago. On this island Thor saw the remarkable resemblence to the massive stone carvings on Fatu Hiva and to the stone carvings on Easter Island. This adventure would be the one that helped him form his theory of native peoples from South Amercia travelling to the Marquesas not from Polynesia.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You can't buy a ticket to paradise, January 28, 2005

By 

Smallchief - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature (Hardcover)

As a boy I yearned to escape from civilization and the Marquesas Islands in the south Pacific seemed as far away a place as could be found. Thor Heyerdahl, a young man who was to become a famous adventurer and author, felt the same way and he and his new wife came to the island of Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas to live in 1937. The couple lived on the island for eight months following in the footsteps of previous visitors such as Herman Melville and Paul Gauguin.

Life was idyllic on Fatu Hiva. The daily bread could be picked off trees amidst tropical splendor and a clear, splashing river. But there was also trouble in paradise: disease --elephantitis and open running sores -- mosquitos, unfriendly natives, and mud. In seeing the remnants of Marquesan civilization -- destroyed by the white man and his diseases -- the germ of Heyerdahl's theories about trans-oceanic contacts between America and Polynesia grew.

"Fatu Hiva" is a fetching book, both for its delicious descriptions of living in a tropical paradise and the frank accounts of disillusionment of the young couple. In the end, the Garden of Eden became cloying and they stared endlessly out to sea longing to see the sail of an inter-island boat so they could escape their island and return to civilization. "One can't buy a ticket to paradise," was Heyerdahl's concluson.

Smallchief

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How do we define progress?, September 26, 2007

By 

Kirk W. Leichner (Still wandering) - See all my reviews

As a young man, Heyerdahl questioned man's rush away from nature in the name of progress. In the late 1930's, with his new wife Liv, Heyerdahl set out to "return to nature." After ruling out continent after continent, country after country, island after island, the two finally agreed that the Island of Fatu Hiva would be a place where they could go back to living as people once lived.

They would live off the land, eat the fruits of nature, fish the waters, travel barefoot, and be away from all the things that cause our world to move at a breakneck pace. Heyerdahl also forsaw WWII, another reason to be away from the madness of Europe.

On Fatu Hiva, Thor and Liv found what they were looking for, but also so much more. Not only is this a typical Heyerdahl book of adventure and new places, but it also delves deeply into human nature, human desire, and questions why we do the things that make us happy. This is a fantastic book and should not only provide you with a view of a tropical wonderland, but should also provoke thoughts on your own life.