8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful tour of many fascinating islands, March 20, 2006
This review is from: Searching for Paradise: A Grand Tour of the World's Unspoiled Islands (Paperback)
_Searching for Paradise_ by Thurston Clarke was a wonderful, well-written, witty book touring many of the world's islands, from the arctic island of Svalbard to sunny South Pacific islands like Abemama and a number of islands in between. I found the book a good mixture of history and travelogue and loved the author's descriptions of the sites, architecture, and in many cases fauna and flora of the places he visited as well as interviews with those who lived there.
Daniel Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ is one of the greatest stories of Western literature, so much a part of Western culture that its story haunts the very concept of an island, so much so that each person landing on an island brings Crusoe with them. Crusoe he writes "persuades us that islands are more liberating than confining, more contemplative than lonely," a place where one can meet God more easily because one is isolated from the wickedness of the world.
Clarke set out to find the reason for the most passionate and "enduring geographic love affair of all time," that between humans and islands, to identify what creates "islomania" (a gripping love for islands) and "islomanes" (island lovers). His intellectual journey took him not only to _Robinson Crusoe_, but also _Lord of the Flies_, _Peter Pan_, _Treasure Island_, _Swiss Family Robinson_, _The Odyssey_, _The Tempest_, _South Pacific_, and even James Bond and _Gilligan's Island_ (that latter which he detests by the way). It also of course took him to over a dozen islands and islets in oceans throughout the world.
Does Clarke find the answers to his question? He doesn't find a definitive answer, but does find many theories. Some islands may be appealing because they are so close to many images of the Garden of Eden; the Bandas of eastern Indonesia are the "archetypal island paradise," with palm trees, gorgeous beaches, reefs teeming with fish, dense forests, and verdant mountains. This very attraction has doomed many islands to rampant overdevelopment, pollution, and an eradication of indigenous fauna, flora, and culture, something that Clarke recounted again and again in the book. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Caribbean, where too many islands had become what he called "mooring blocks" for cruise liners, lands where the locals had been encouraged to sell their precious property, spent the money, and in the end became maids, cleaning buildings they couldn't afford on land that their ancestors used to own. Parrot-haunted jungles, crumbling colonial forts, and small fishing villages were razed to make way for condominiums, exclusive resort hotels, and fast food restaurants.
Some like the near timeless, open-air museum quality of some islands, islands which became natural attics, holding all manner of relics. Islanders in Vanuatu walk daily among the ruins of World War II equipment, hoping for the Americans to return. The South Pacific island of Kosrae's Christians - nearly the entirely island - faithfully preserve nearly identical services to those brought to them by 19th century New England missionaries. The private island of Niihau in the Hawaiian Islands preserves some of the last native Hawaiian Polynesian culture and many otherwise extinct Hawaiian plants.
Others were attracted to islands because a small number of people or even one man or woman could make a huge difference there, their actions remembered for years, decades, or centuries later. Des Alwi, an entrepreneur and preservationist, is adored on the island of Banda Neira and will likely be remembered by islanders for many decades to come for his numerous great deeds on behalf of the islanders. On Espiritu Santo (part of Vanuatu in the South Pacific) Clarke met the local man Tommy Wells, a person who had worked with the Americans when they had a bustling military base during World War II, who not only pined for the Americans to return but remembered with great affection two individual American serviceman, one of whom Wells found out died on Guadalcanal and still caused him sadness. Clarke wondered if anywhere in the world were memories of this man, Captain Burke, fresh enough in anyone else's mind to evoke tears. Wells told his children and grandchildren about Burke, so it is possible that a century from now he will still be remembered.
Other islands were attractive because of the sense of community and belonging that they offered. Though he sneered a little at pensioners who moved to islands, thinking that they suddenly belong to a community because they exchanged pleasantries with store employees, many islands, often very isolated and underdeveloped ones, like Utila near the coast of Honduras and Eigg off the coast of Scotland, were places where everyone knows everyone else, children are safe to run around and play without worries, towns and communities so small that one can recognize who was coming by their familiar silhouette in the dark or the sound of the engine of their particular car.
Still other islands are not quite resort islands but comfortable vacation islands, ones that offer many of the attractions of islands I just mentioned, if only for a few weeks or months each summer, back in the days when families took long vacations together, mingling with the locals who lived there year round and becoming friends with them. These islands - like Fishers Island near Long Island and Campobello Island (a Canadian island just north of Maine) - also offered shared experiences for families who returned year after year and became fixed in the memory of their children and their children, associated with happy times, good food, and summer romances.
Others come to islands for a marvelous sense of isolation. The Roosevelt loved Campobello because of its relative lack of telephones and electricity. Many flee to Crusoe's (or rather Alexander Selkirk's that is, the inspiration for Crusoe) island of Mas a Tierra for its profound sense of isolation, located as it is four hundred miles off the coast of Chile, perhaps to escape financial or romantic problems at home.
A well-written book with nice maps and a great bibliography.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A rich and fascinating trip, August 10, 2002
This review is from: Searching for Paradise: A Grand Tour of the World's Unspoiled Islands (Paperback)
One might think that Thurston Clarke is compiling his travel books by geographical feature, first a book on the equator and now one on islands. We might expect his next to be about the Tropic of Cancer or salt marshes. Whatever it is, I suspect it will be a worthy and fascinating concoction.
While he writes this book from the perspective of what he calls a "islomane", one who fascinated with islands, it makes compelling reading for someone who lacks this particular fascination. As a prairie boy I am more fascinated by mountains than islands, but because Clarke weaves so much collateral information into his text, you will never be anything less than fully engaged. He visits all kinds of islands from tourist meccas to summer cottages to northern coal mines. These journeys seem terribly difficult, but Clarke never lets the encumbrances of modern travel get in the way of his examination of both the fascination he has with islands in general and the particulars of what makes any given island worth visiting. He comes to many surprisingly interesting generalizations about the nature of islands and islanders (that for example changes on islands are usually more permanent than elsewhere).
As a traveler he reminds me of Paul Theroux, and certainly his writing is on that level, though without the annoying flashes of ego that often make Theroux painful. It is interesting to compare Clarke's island jaunts with Theroux's Happy Isle of Oceania. Both authors distinctly render the sense of desperation that emerges from these isolated places, but Clarke appears to have a greater sense of the humanity of the people who inhabit them. Perhaps it takes an islomane to truly empathize with those likewise afflicted.
Much as I enjoyed this book, I would also recommend Clarke's book on his travels around the equator. I found these places more interesting, and the quality of the writing is just as high.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An overall good read if you're fascinated by small dots on a map, October 9, 2006
This review is from: Searching for Paradise: A Grand Tour of the World's Unspoiled Islands (Paperback)
'Searching for Crusoe' aka 'Searching for Paradise' is an account of visits to thirteen islands scattered over the globe. These islands have been selected for representing one of the aspects that make any small island appealing, such as being famous, infamous, holy, personal, friendly or even frightening. The chapters mainly deal with the history of the islands and the people living on it.
Each chapter is pretty balanced, on average the stories are not too shallow, not too romantic, not to journalistic, not to philosophical, not too much Theroux, in fact, it's a lot but, not too much of everything, and I don't know if that is good thing. It seems the author is pretty familiar with the places he visits for having visited them before or having made study of them. Frequently a visit is centred around a handful of individuals helping him to find, or better said, to confirm what he was looking for. Clarke seems to be too much of a journalist to really get lost into the romance of islomania but on the other hand seems to be fascinated by them so much that old style island living is a bit over glorified. But he succeeds in portraying why islands can be so fascinating and along the lines show that one fascination of islands is the potential to understand and overview all of it and it's uniqueness. Besides from a bit of a poshy writing style it's an overall good read if you're fascinated by small dots on a map.
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