Customer Reviews

To Live in Paradise

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Renee Denis came from a fascinatingand unusual family, which no doubt explains her choice of a lifestyle for herself. Her book helps one to understand why the Polynesian extended family overcomes the problems you might think would exist with so many single mothers (including the author). An amazingingly interesting life!

Thanks to modern technology, I had searched for an old friend & tour director colleague, Rene Roosevelt Denis & found her, here on Amazon, as author of the very stories she used to tell... around a campfire working with French groups visiting California & the Southwest National Parks in the early 1980's.
She then came to live in my collective Berkeley household of pioneers in the environmental movement.( FYI-- still active, [...]
Renee shared with us the same photos now published in her book, cooked some local dishes from her cultural encounters. I still make the polenta recipe from her first husband Gustav.
One of her #& Marlo Brando's)young Tahitian neighbors also came to live with us to study English in the San Francisco Bay Area... I had even traveled with her to Mexico to visit the place where her mother had written her life story...
Due to my own travels, we had lost contact in recent years. The last I knew was that she had gone south to finally write the story of her life... TADUM! VOICI! I was delighted to discover it... snail mail to her previous address had been returned to me as no longer at that address without a forwarded one...
Rene has such insights into how to celebrate diverse cultures, writes just like she talks. She is a gifted story teller with an unusual life full of amazing episodes!
Though I was already familiar with so many chapters in this book & each page made me nod with friendly familiarity, even without prior acquaintance of this remarkable woman, I do highly recommend this book to learn about early tourism in Haiti & Tahiti & elsewhere. Tourism is an industry ripe to acknowledge now for its decades' worth contribution to any economy & often best tool for teaching tolerance...