100 books like Islands and Beaches

I like to think of Patrick Kirch as “Mr. Pacific Archaeology”—no one has written more, or more winningly, about Polynesian prehistory—and On the Road of the Winds is his introduction to the field. First published in 2002 and reissued in an updated edition in 2017, this elegant, eminently readable survey not only covers the history of archaeology in Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia but explains how the archaeological findings of the past half-century relate to discoveries in biology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, botany, and countless other fields.

This is really a one-of-a-kind scientific textbook. Though technical, it reads like an adventure novel. Lewis was part scientist, part adventurer, part sailor, and an excellent author. The book is full of charts, sketches, and photographs that take you to the South Pacific atolls of Polynesia and Micronesia. This book is not for the day sailor. Written in 1972, Lewis learns and masters the art of ocean navigation from native-born seafarers, like Tevake, who in the middle of nothing knew exactly where he was. He and others learned the skills from their fathers, using only the stars, wind patterns, reflective waves, sea swells, currents, birds, and cloud formations. Lewis learned to sail from one island to another without the aid of modern navigation instruments. Lewis makes the skill of natural navigation into a true adventure.

On a personal note, in the 1970s, I paid many visits to Kwajalein Atoll in… show more.

Two Worlds, by Dame Anne Salmond, is another crossover work—part history and part anthropology. The author, an eminent New Zealand anthropologist, uses her knowledge of traditional Māori culture (what people believed, what they ate, how they lived) to flesh out the historical record left by early European visitors to Aotearoa/New Zealand. The result is a rich, authoritative account of encounters that for far too long have been described from only one point of view.

This handsome coffee table book with short, topical essays by Ben Finney, Geoffrey Irwin, Sam Low, and others is focused on Polynesian voyaging. Richly illustrated with paintings, photographs, and maps, it brings together the major threads: oral traditions, canoe design, navigational methods, theories of settlement. Most of the content can be found elsewhere, but the presentation is impressive; if you wanted just one book to browse through, this would be a fun one to have.

This is an unusual take on perhaps the best-known mutiny of them all: the mutiny on HMS Bounty. While most books on the topic focus on the conditions around the mutiny or the state of the relationship between Captain Bligh and the mutineers, especially Fletcher Christian, Denning takes the view of a cultural anthropologist and explores the language and theatrical performances of those involved and situates these against the historical context and the way that context – and therefore the accounts of the mutiny – shifted across time.

Typee is Herman Melville’s account of his sojourn on the Marquesan Island of Nuku Hiva in the 1800s. It nearly replicated my distant relative’s story, making it a must-read.

Melville was a young sailor with an adventurous spirit. Disenchanted with his hard life on a whaling ship he deserted and escaped to Nuku Hiva’s Bay of Taipaivi where he was captured by a cannibal tribe. For four months, he lived and survived among savages. 

After Melville returned to civilization he later wrote Typee – the story that forever changed how I view savages. A century-plus later, I stepped freely off a boat onto Nuku Hiva’s distant shore. Visions of the impetuous and foolhardy sailor relative whose footprints I was about to trace made my scalp tighten with anticipation.  

Despite the scholarly title, this book is a highly readable account of traditional Hawaiian culture in Ka‘ū, the southernmost district of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Mary Kawena Pukui (1895–1986) was a preeminent Hawaiian scholar, author, composer, hula expert, and educator. She was born and raised in Ka‘ū, a remote, rural area where the old culture endured outside of the Westernization of the islands. In 1935 she traveled home with anthropologist E.S. Handy to gather information from her elders. Their book provides details and insights about the district’s history and ecology, the legendary setting (gods and spirits), the extended household and kinship system, the life cycle of individuals, manners and customs, and the relationships between people and ancestral spirits and animals.

We have focused our recommendations on Melville’s (and other people’s) takes on Polynesian islands, but Melville also wrote about another crucial Pacific archipelago, the Galápagos Islands. His collection of sketches, “The Encantadas,” explores a very different world from Nukuhiva, Maui, or Tahiti, one nearly empty of human inhabitants, given over to birds, tortoises, iguanas, and insects. Yet here as elsewhere, Melville finds plenty to satisfy his “itch for things remote.” And here as elsewhere he meditates on human nature: the misfits, petty tyrants, and exiles who might find a home in such a forbidding place. If you think of Melville as an entertaining chronicler of the Pacific world, you will find much in that vein here—but also philosophy, history, and a sort of melancholy romance.

Though I am not an anthropologist, I devour ethnographies with a gusto that can only be attributed to disciplinary envy. There are several fascinating ethnographies of emotions and how they differ across cultures. Beatty’s book stands out among them for its rich ethnographic description as well as the sophistication with which he treats the relationship of emotion and culture.

He spots the limitations that lab experiments impose on studying emotions and suggests instead that we have to pay attention to the narratives in which emotions are situated, made, and deemed meaningful. And I rather like how he punctures “affect theory.”

Still exciting after all these years! Perhaps because it is politically incorrect and unself-conscious. 

The cover blurb says it is an "investigation of the sex lives of the men and women of the Trobriand Islands and deals with prenuptial intercourse, marriage, divorce, pregnancy, erotic psychology, ritual, morals, and manners" – forbidden territory nowadays. 

I do not excuse the sexism and racism occasionally detectable, but think the detail, intimacy, and authorial reflexivity about a disappeared world are more valuable now than ever.  A century ahead of his time, Malinowski included himself in his observations and ideas about others.