Pacific Magazine > Magazine > June 29, 2007

Stuff We Like

Stuff We Like

Stuff We Like

Redefining The Pacific? {Book}

At a time of growing debate about the future of RAMSI and new roles for regional organizations such as the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission and the Pacific Islands Forum, it’s important to reflect on what this will mean for people in the region. “Redefining the Pacific?” gathers presentations from the Otago Foreign Policy School, which brought together politicians and academics to look at the increasing economic and political integration of the region.

Edited by Jenny Bryant-Tokalau and Ian Frazer, the book includes chapters and a useful bibliography on all the hot topics affecting regional cooperation: security and interventionism; fisheries; the EU-ACP Economic Partnership Agreement; and the Pacific Plan. The involvement of Australia and New Zealand in key regional organizations gives them significant clout in influencing the institutions of the new regionalism—the book’s value is the presentation of mainly New Zealand perspectives rather than the view from Australia, dominated by Canberra’s concern over “failed states” and the “arc of instability.”

Unfortunately, at US$99, the book is priced way beyond the reach of students, but it’s a useful resource for libraries and research centers looking at the future of our Pacific community.

You can order a copy from the publishers at www.ashgate.com



Tales from the Torrid Zone {Book}
Traveling is not merely going from one place to another, and writing about it is more than recording what happens, as Alexander Frater artfully demonstrates in “Tales from the Torrid Zone.” It is a travelogue with dashes of memoir framed by a lifetime of studied musings on changing cultures; the result is an intimate and affectionate exploration of the region that bears the weight of both hemispheres.

It helps that Frater isn’t just a writer (though he was chief travel correspondent for The Observer in London), but a local. Thus the book fittingly begins on Iririki, his birthplace, one of 80 islands of Vanuatu. 

It’s a meandering account of remembered journeys, not only through South Pacific islands, but also the Sudan, Oman, and Burma—truly spanning the globe. Throughout, Frater offers a fascinating avalanche of exhaustive detail—his chapter on the coconut is a prose ode any islander will appreciate. But the intention is not to survey the exotic but a real man’s communion with his climactic and cultural origins.

Tender and humorous yet erudite, Frater’s stories are expansive without being indulgent; spare without being confusing. Though the temporal and contextual connections are often adrift, the path is punctuated by empathic reverence for all aspects of tropical existence. What’s important isn’t the timeline, but knowing and appreciating the land for what it is.

KNOPF; 384 pages; $25.95