Why am I passionate about this?
I landed in Samoa when I was 36 and spent the next 26 years there, working for environmental, cultural, and historical resource preservation. The islands took me in. I found in the islands a natural and social intimacy unlike any I had known possible back stateside. I became committed to conserving it from the incursions of continental crudity. My final 13 years there I was State Historic Preservation Officer for American Samoa. Before I left, I wrote a series of novels to share by illustration what I had managed to learn about the cultural interface.
John's book list on West meeting paradise in the South Seas
Why did John love this book?
This book is one of those books I reread every few years for the pleasure of Stevenson’s prose mastery and its richness in accurate detail of South Pacific Island existence.
RLS ranked this novella among his top accomplishments. Written in his final years at his home on the island of Upolu in Samoa, it is a lesson in the art of storytelling. Set on a small South Seas Island, it encapsulates in its tale of one white trader’s experience the essence of the human interface between two disparate cultures. While his In the South Seas journals more deeply explore the intricacies of island life, This book takes you there 150 years ago.
1 author picked The Beach of Falesa as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Complete and unabridged paperback edition.
First published in 1892.