Customer Reviews

Playing with Water: Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island (Twentieth Century Lives)

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Paterson is living on a small island in the Philippines and he is joining the natives in diving (i.e. fishing) for a living. We scuba-divers, as we only come for 1-2 week vacations, often are not experiencing the reality around our dive sites. Paterson's book was helping me understanding more of the countries I was visiting. Very instructive are his personal insights about ecology in a third world country and the connections to the economical and social structure. I found it very valuable that the insights do not follow the well known beaten paths about the third world but are rather well founded, personal observations. This makes this book a much more interesting read than any other book about the subject that I have ever read before.

i read this book so many years ago, but i can still remember
how good it is. this book is not only about the underwater
world but also about the goings-on in a typical barrio in
the philippines. it has a socio-economic aspect to it that i
found quite realistic, having been born and raised in that very
same third world country. it amazed and pleased me that a
foreigner like hamilton-paterson could, quite accurately, capture
the very essence of filipino rural society---like the old woman who
he suspects isnt so aloof and taciturn as she seems
and the children of the barrio who frolick in the water and
in their humble amusements, oblivious of the shortcomings of a
third world upbringing. the book is an unusual stew of underwater
adventure and an unpatronizing account of a life among barrio folk.