Living on islands

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Barbara A. Margolies

An eight-year-old boy who lives in the city of Kathmandu takes a tour of several small towns and villages of Nepal, observing many traditional customs and activities.

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Gavin Young

It was the legendary traveller Wilfred Thesiger who first introduced Gavin Young to the Marshes of Iraq. Since then Young has been entranced by both the beauty of the Marshes and by the Marsh Arabs who inhabit them, a people whose lifestyle is almost unchanged from that of their predecessors, the Ancient Sumerians. On his return to the Marshes some years later Gavin Young found that the twentieth-century had rudely intruded on this lifestyle and that war was threatening to make the Marsh Arabs existence extinct. Return to the Marshes, first published in 1977, is at once a moving tribute to a unique way of life as well as a love story to a place and its people. 'A superbly written essay which combines warmth of personal tone, a good deal of easy historical scholarship and a talent for vivid description rarely found outside good fiction.' Jonathan Raban, Sunday Times

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Herman Melville

At one time the most popular of Melville's works, Typee was known as a travelogue that idealized and romanticized a mysterious South Sea island for readers in the ruthless, industrial, "civilized" world of the nineteenth century. But Melville's story of Tommo, the Yankee sailor who enters the flawed Pacific paradise of Nuku Hiva, is also a fast-moving adventure tale, an autobiographical account of the author's own Polynesian stay, an examination of the nature of good and evil, and a frank exploration of sensuality and exotic ritual. This edition of Typee, which reproduces the definitive text and the complete, never-before-published manuscript reading text, includes invaluable explanatory commentary by John Bryant.

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Mark Busse, Susan Turner, Nick Araho

In the 1980s, a commercially viable amount of oil was discovered near Lake Kutubu in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Following the completion of a pipeline from the oil field to a marine terminal in the Gulf of Papua south of Kikori in 1992, the Kutubu Petroleum Development Project became the country's first oil producer. The activity accompanying the oil project has dramatically affected life in the Project area, but social change did not begin with the discovery of oil. By the time the pipeline was completed, people living in the Lake Kutubu and Kikori areas had experienced decades of government influence and Christian mission activity. This book offers a picture of daily life in the Project area during 1991 and 1992. Settlement and residence patterns, subsistence, material culture, and exchange, all show a mixture of old and new. A consideration of the changing meanings that objects and customs have for the local people give a sense of contemporary life not only in the Project area but in rural Papua New Guinea in general.