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White Savages In The South Seas

Name: White Savages In The South Seas
Author: Mel Kernahan
ISBN: 9781859840047

by Mel Kernahan

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Overview

This is a book about Polynesia after the cruise ship has left, the jet has flown off into the sunset, and the mai tai curtain has dropped on a dream that was more performance than reality. This first-hand narrative introduces the reader to the Cook Islands and an extraordinary array of their inhabitants: Susy No Pants who lives an uproarious life of pleasure, but never strays far from who she is or where she came from; a nuclear nomad from the Tuamotus who attempts suicide by ancient means in California's Balboa Fun Zone, home of the chocolate-dipped banana;
and French bureaucrats who concoct an elaborate charade to create an uplifting image of the Foreign Legion in Papeete, Tahiti. The author encounters missionaries, randy kings, dictators, sailors, drunk island tyrants and visionaries on remote isles where tourists seldom tread.
Kernahan does not find paradise, although she admits to having looked for it.

About the Author, Mel Kernahan

Mel Kernahan has written for Cosmopolitan, The San Francisco Chronicle
and The Sacramento Bee as well as various Pacific Island publications.
She was the first woman ever selected by the Cook Islands Government to serve as Overseas Public Information Officer, and has worked as a cultural consultant on Polynesia to the City of Los Angeles and UCLA.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Before getting tickets for that Tahitian holiday you've dreamed about, read this book. It's not another tourist guide-rather, a quick study in cultural (mis)understanding that could avert a few embarrassing mistakes, especially for women traveling (like the author) alone. Kernahan's collection reads like a compendium of troubles in paradise, patching together outrageous comedy, incisive observation and caustic social comment in bold swatches like those she used when stitching appliqus on her tifaifai-the Polynesian equivalent of a quilt. Her demystifying of one of the few remaining fantasy frontiers left in late-20th-century life is bound to seem a tad cruel to the white savages of the title, but she makes quick work of debunking some unattractive myths and prejudices held by islanders as well. Readers will take in the confessions of a Cook Island queen; share the amorous escapades of Suzy No Pants-doyenne of Papeete's most raucous bar; decode homesick ritual played out nightly at a Tahitian restaurant in California; trace nuclear fallout; and witness the final return from French prison of a revered freedom fighter. These privileged intimacies were won by the author in her many years studying the region, they are signal moments readers would never catch on a two-week cruise in paradise, but can be savored here, served up crisply, with wit, candor and charm. (Nov.)