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The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific Paperback – December 8, 2006
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The author of The Great Railway Bazaar explores the South Pacific by kayak: “This exhilarating epic ranks with [his] best travel books” (Publishers Weekly).
In one of his most exotic and adventuresome journeys, travel writer Paul Theroux embarks on an eighteen-month tour of the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines.
Along the way, Theroux meets the king of Tonga, encounters street gangs in Auckland, and investigates a cargo cult in Vanuatu. From Australia to Tahiti, Fiji, Easter Island, and beyond, this exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming observations and high adventure.
- Print length528 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateDecember 8, 2006
- Dimensions5.5 x 1.19 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-10061865898X
- ISBN-13978-0618658985
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"Engaging and at times brilliant...he goes places where the rest of us might fear to paddle, often beaching his kayak on a small South Pacific island without the foggiest idea whether those awaiting him will be friendly, indifferent, or anxious to give him a good thwack...well worth reading." USA Today
"A superb blend of sharp-eyed observation and pungently expressed opinion. It's hardly paradise, this lovely part of the world, but Theroux makes it endlessly fascinating." Newsday
"Feisty, eloquent, and vast in scope...a multilayered odyssey." The San Francisco Chronicle
"Perceptive, terribly readable, and wickedly funny...[An] exhilarating book." --Book Review The Los Angeles Times —
About the Author
PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; 1st edition (December 8, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 528 pages
- ISBN-10 : 061865898X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618658985
- Item Weight : 1.05 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1.19 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #580,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #180 in General India Travel Guides
- #304 in General Asia Travel Books
- #1,764 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).
In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London. He was a resident in Britain for a total of seventeen years. In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992). Paul Theroux has now returned to the United States, but he continues to travel widely.
Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. Blindness is his latest novel. Most of his books are published by Penguin.
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Theroux mentions so many different things during his travels that it is difficult to tell you just what the books are like, except to say that while reading, it feels like you are there witnessing these people and places with him. I will give just one example from Oceania which I found great fun to read, namely his description of Dame Cath Tizard's way of eating. He wrote, "She scraped food onto her fork, but before she heaved it she nudged more onto the fork with her thumb. And after she ate the forkful she licked her thumb. Once I caught her grinning at me, but she was not grinning. She was trying to dislodge a bit of food that had found its way between her teeth, and still talking and grinning, she began picking her teeth. Having freed the food from her teeth, she glanced at it and pushed it into her mouth. (while talking of her being chosen governor-general)...Her finger was in her mouth, fishing for bits of trapped lamb sinews... And she slurped the food off her finger, and then began scraping the plate...." I'm not saying I have the greatest table manners myself, but I simply revelled in reading this description.
I can understand that there are many people who wouldn't like reading him and who would disagree with Paul Theroux's views. I am saying I find his writing thoroughly entertaining and relaxing because I like to see the world the way it really is, the beautiful as well as the ugly, and this book satisfies my curiosity about much of the South Pacific.
What Theroux describes is a very low brow culture who use the ocean as a garbage dump and toilet--there is little organization except where religion from missionaries has prevailed. There is a constant background torment from biting flys and mosquitoes. These people have completely lost their original talents of coping with the environment...They don't make boats anymore (for the most part) don't fish in deep waters... They are reduced very much like Indian reservations in the US to gov't handouts where they are lucky enough to get them and getting drunk or high on kava. Violent rude inhospitable for the most part...again like an Indian reservation.
You come out concluding they are probably less intelligent than the Indians of Fiji--unmotivated and living for the day to get drunk or show up in church.
The only part of the book that gets boring is once he arrives in Hawaii where there is a totally incongruous chapter on a luxury bungalow---you can only conclude he was paid for that as an advertisement.
I encourage you to read it to see the problems New Zealand and Australia are dealing with. Theroux does not give these 2 countries any credit but then he is a dyed in the wool liberal former peace corps type. Which makes the horror of the islands all the more believable.