bookshelf

THE SHARK GOD

Name: THE SHARK GOD
Author: Charles Montgomery
ISBN: 0-06-076516-X

ENCOUNTERS WITH GHOSTS AND ANCESTORS IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC

by Charles Montgomery ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2006

Travel fans will enjoy Montgomery's colorful, evocative narrative, but will want to take his survey of South Seas folklore...

bookshelf

Following in the footsteps of his missionary great-grandfather, Montgomery journeys to the remote South Seas in search of pagan rituals, native magic and the story of an early martyr.

What he finds is hardly idyllic. Leapfrogging among south Pacific archipelagos—the Solomons, the Reef Islands and Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides)—Montgomery encounters natives still struggling to escape ignorance, poverty and civil war. True, the cannibalism once practiced in Melanesia is gone. But instead of the lush paradise one would expect, Montgomery discovers that most of these remote island outposts have hardly progressed since American GIs moved on following World War II. With no jobs and no prospects, natives seem to spend most of their days drinking kava or chewing betel nuts, two opiates derived from local plants. The author sets out in search of the pagan rituals that are still being practiced there despite a century of evangelical work by Anglicans, Seventh-day Adventists, Roman Catholics and others. Montgomery finds that native magic, or “kastom,” still holds great power among the locals, but the supposed “shaman,” or holy men, seem generally to be drug-hazed con artists whose boasts of magic powers and native myths would make most grade-schoolers skeptical. Not Montgomery: Indeed, the author approaches his subject with the conviction of a wide-eyed believer, even after one shaman after the other declines his requests for a demonstration of magic powers. Montgomery is a talented writer, and this tour is delivered in vivid, precise prose, but his failure to ask hard questions and his tendency to strain for drama where it doesn't exist mar what should have been a more clear-eyed travelogue.

Travel fans will enjoy Montgomery's colorful, evocative narrative, but will want to take his survey of South Seas folklore with more than a few grains of salt.

Pub Date: July 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-076516-X

Page Count: 384

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY

bookshelf

CROSSING THE LINE

A BLUEJACKET'S WORLD WAR II ODYSSEY

by Alvin Kernan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 1994

bookshelf

An unpretentious personal memoir of participation in WW II. Kernan (a senior advisor in humanities at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; The Death of Literature, 1990) left the shadow of the mountains of Wyoming to join the Navy. He soon found himself on the carrier Enterprise just outside Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Kernan watched Doolittle's bombers take off for Tokyo, was aboard the Hornet in its death throes as Japanese firepower sank it, had a sea-level view of the decisive Battle of Midway, and was again outside Pearl Harbor on V-J Day. The young sailor advanced from ordnanceman to airborne gunner and finally to chief petty officer at 22, when he was discharged at the end of the war. But that's not what the story is about. It's about the unadvertised superiority of torpedoes labeled ``Made in Japan'' and the appropriate ratio of tracers to armor-piercing ammo. It's about shore leave and drinking and women. It's about tedium and terror and random death. One sailor's story becomes, somehow, emblematic of the collective memories of all those boys of war half a century ago. And no matter who the survivors are now, this is a tale of who they—and their comrades—were then. Kernan remembers sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge to the war in the Pacific: ``My eyes moved from one face to another of men who are as alive to me now as they ever were but whose bones are washing around the bottom of the sea, tangled in the wreckage of their planes, between Okinawa and Taiwan.'' This quiet book is no techno-heroic Tom Clancy text. It's an honest story of collective courage, evocative, well-written, and fixed before the colors fade. (Photos and maps, not seen) (Book-of- the-Month Club/History Book Club selections)

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1994

ISBN: 1-55750-455-5

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | MILITARY | HISTORY

bookshelf

A CHOSEN FEW

THE RESURRECTION OF EUROPEAN JEWRY

by Mark Kurlansky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1994

bookshelf

A richly descriptive and insightful survey of post-Holocaust European Jewry. Kurlansky (A Continent of Islands, 1992) interviews scores of Holocaust survivors and their children in Germany, Holland, Poland, Slovakia, and other countries to examine how and why Jews still live in Europe. He moves from the end of WW II to the present, showing people just after the war, often in displaced-persons camps, and then later, having survived—opening a bakery in Paris, enrolling in a Jewish school in Budapest, or running a museum in Prague. Kurlansky states that ``Jewry today has a future in Europe, and Hitler at last has been defeated,'' and he gives statistical evidence that European Jewry is rebounding. But the qualitative state of European Jewry remains less clear. Many of the interview subjects have had Jewish identity thrust on them, whether they want it or not, by political opponents or by the biases and prejudices of the majority cultures in which they reside. And the few traditional Jews (in the growing communities of France and the Lowlands) are immigrants from North Africa or Hasidim who have come to ply the diamond trade. Many of the younger people we meet have only been told of their Jewish background when a parent is dying or when a child is found to be on the receiving or giving end of anti- Semitism. Anti-Semitism, in fact, has been a constant over the years, whether it's the rantings of Nazis or the subtle, anti- Zionist sneers of present-day foreign secretaries. This is not a catalogue of fear and shame, however, as Kurlansky, with a novelist's eye for irony and description, offers many moments of transcendence and humor: entertaining culture clashes between communists and capitalists, religious and secular, Zionists and diasporists. The humor darkens when American tourists are greeted at the Warsaw train station with cries of ``Taxi? Hotel? Auschwitz?'' in Poland's new ``world fair of genocide.'' A lively, penetrating follow-up to Holocaust readings that speaks volumes about the resiliency of the Jewish people.