THOSE WILD WEST INDIES

Colloquial, almost slangy, fast-paced and very modern book about the high points of the West Indies. Not a conventional travel book, since each chapter takes up one phase or another of the island ports -- the heat, the bars, fishing, animals, music, banana plantation life, archeology, adventurers and historic figures of the past, the lotteries, clothes, and so on. Central America, Panama, Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba are the places he knows, through fifteen years living among them. Entertaining reading, as background and color, with much of the beauty, and much of the disillusion, and little (except incidentally) of the history, or the places to see, or the things to do (outside the bars and clubs, which come in for more than their share). Not a ""one book on the West Indies"" -- but another facet.