There is much magic in this book. Its authors, Nordhoff and Hall, take you to a place and time that has vanished from history--the South Seas in the immediate aftermath of World War I. The reader is made wistful for that age of trading schooners plying the waterways among the atolls, reefs, and larger islands of the South Seas. Tahiti is at the center, but the true adventures take place on nearly forgotten atolls populated by less than a hundred people. Places where the myths, legends, and stories of Polynesia still hold sway, albeit under the ever increasing presence of American and European commerce. At the end of the book, Nordhoff and Hall state that the islands have claimed the two permanently. As it happens, this almost turned out to be true. James Norman Hall remained in the South Seas for almost all the rest of his life. Charles Bernard Nordhoff stayed there for two decades.

Throughout, Nordhoff and Hall themselves long for earlier days in Polynesia. They imagine a time one hundred or two hundred years earlier, when the peoples of the region were untouched by the materialism, nurtured desires, and presence of White men. It is quite ironic, really. For just as Nordhoff and Hall lament the passing of that time, current readers in the late second decade of the twenty-first century feel the same towards Nordhoff and Hall's time.

This non-fiction book provides a look at the islands just before their historic cultures were obliterated for all time by the coming of World War II and its aftermath. Nordhoff and Hall could never have imagined the impact of the war in the Pacific, although they did live to see it--Nordhoff died in 1947, in California, and Hall died in 1951, on Tahiti. For those readers who still wish to be swept up in the romance and adventure of that earlier era, this volume remains a staple. ( )

My own experiences of Polynesia are from the 1970s and 1980s. Much is now citified and altered by the modern influences of European life. But, even though the second is almost always true, much is still as it is described in this book. It's a magical part of our planet and visiting it, or reading about it from any decade's volumes, is recommended for enquiring minds of all ages. ( )