So much of what happened during the political development of Micronesia now come to light as a result of this well researched book. Until now, much of what transpired during the political status negotiations required tedious search in US government archives and the Library of Congress. That is if the documents were declassified. This book is insightful.

So mucy of what happened during the political development of Micronesia now come to light as a result of this well researched book. Until now, much of what transpired during the political status negotiations required tedious search in US government archives or the Library of Congress (if unclassified). Insightful!

I speak as one who has lived in the Northern Mariana Islands for more than thirty years, and who had a role in the events (I was one of those who were interviewed) and who knew and worked with many of the central figures involved in them. Willens and Siemer have written a thoroughly researched and historically accurate work, and one which I enjoyed reading immensely -- as will anyone interested in this corner of the Pacific.

You will not be disappointed by Keeper of the Night. The style is a bit different from Louisiana Sky and Zachary Beaver, but it is still poetic. It reminded me of A Step from Heaven, short vignette's from a young girl's view. The Guam setting makes for a perfect summer novel. Teen girls will especially enjoy this gem.

Award-winning author Kimberly Willis Holt (When Zachary Beaver Came To Town) now brings the poignant story of a young girl's determination to help her family overcome or at least cope with the pain and loss they feel following their mother's suicide.

As read by actress Vivian B. McLaughlin the tale is profound, painful, yet beautiful.

Isabel is good at pretending. She would like to imagine that her mother's death was not unusual; she can think that as no one seems able to voice the reality of the tragedy. Tata responds to overwhelming grief by sleeping on the floor where her mother's body lay. Olivia wets her bed and is wracked by nightmares. Frank, on the other hand, expresses his abandonment by cutting into his bedroom wall.

Isabel knows that she must help them, but how?

There are times when truth is the only antidote for pain.

- Gail Cooke

Keeper of the Night by Kimberly Willis Holt is wonderful. Although this book is written differently than Holt's usual style, it works well. The book deals with a serious subject - suicide - but is neither too depressing or too happy. I also appreciate that at the end, the family is recovering, but not quite there yet. It shows how real life is - always a work in progress.

This account of efforts to understand and deal with threatened exotic-caused extinctions on Guam is a gem. The paper back's blurbs focus on Jaffe's "ecological detective thriller." But it's the seamlessness of the book's widely-informed joined elements -- including biographical and political sketches of great pith, accessible population biology, and How Modern Science Works to try to save avian species -- that's most compelling. This deftness in weaving many individually fascinating threads recalled for me Neal Ascherson's astonishing "Black Sea."

The paperback's Index lists only passing references to DDT -- on pages 26, 27 and 72. Because the bad guy is not a chemical, not one of our products. No, he's one of us. And after the paucity and untimeliness of the legislative response to the Guamanian situation had sunk into my consciousness, it was ironic that in the end, an air force base on the island established the 50-acre "environmental reclamation experiment" Jaffe hopes could begin to turn it all around. Like the ending of William Golding's little masterpiece, with the navy warship rescuing the tribe of island-stranded boys from themselves.

My God! You won't find any birds singing in this masterpiece! Rachel Carson has nothing on this guy! The DDT chapter broke my heart!!!

This is a must book for anyone seeking an understanding of POW life as well as a better understanding of events inside Japan during WWII. Edward Hale takes us on a journey from a carefree life in Guam to Japan as a POW for most of WWII. Helen Gordon, Hale's neice, does a good job of editing Hale's memoirs. After reading the book, I had a much better understanding of how war and POW status impacts human behavior. Gordon is to be commended for making Hale's wonderful memoirs available to the world. This is one of the best books about POW's I have read. For this reason, I gave this book 5 stars.

Beaten, starved and constantly terrorized, Hale's story renews your faith in America and its fighting men. Hale's story of his Navy life in Guam just before the war is a prelude to his poignant experience as a POW. As a reader, you will feel the thunder of bombs, the palpable fear as shot and shell destroy your world... and the gut wrenching fear to know your life is at the mercy of murderous Japanese soldiers.

Hale's is a story or bravery and courage that bears retelling until the end of time. Unknown to the men and women of Guam, they were forfeited to the Japanese months before the war by the decisions of Roosevelt and Churchill, intent upon defeating Hitler. Transported to Japan, the men suffered as slaves to the Japanese war efforts and ultimately saved by the dropping of the atom bombs. Hale's story belongs on the shelf of any student of World War II.

_Dolphin, Dolphin_ is a wonderful story of a 7-year-old and her 70-year-old island native grandmother. The child's special relationship with her grandmother is evident as the older woman shows the little girl how to dance with the dolphins. There is a certain mystical element to explain a tiny dophin tattoo that appears on the young girl's ankle on the last morning before she leaves the island for good. The art work is beautifully done and illustrates the story well. Author and story teller T. K. Cassidy has a real knack for telling a story in print as well as in person. Although _Dolphin, Dolphin_ and Cassidy's first book _The Stone Shaper's Daughter_ are written for children, they both would make excellent examples of legend and folklore for older students. The first one _Stone Shaper's..._ is from ancient times and the second one has a modern setting. Children can have a tiny peek at life on an island like Guam from these stories. Betty Dawn Hamilton, Brownfield High School Librarian, Brownfield, Texas

I'm recently out of college and have had the desire to go to a beautiful region with history, nice beaches, and warm weather for a vacation. Someone told me I should check into Guam so I got this book and was amazed at the detail put into it! It lists different historic sites, parks, beaches, and other great places to visit and everything each one has to offer along with the story behind it. It even summarized a list of twelve essential things to do when you visit Guam which is helpful for an indecisive person like me who would want to do it all!!! :) The clincher that made me sure I want to go there on vacation? The clear and colorful pictures throughout the book that show how incredible and breathtaking each part of the island is! I can't wait to take a hike on Guam to one of their many majestic waterfalls!

An outstanding travel guide to an area in the Pacific. I used this guide for my vacation to Guam. Everything was as the book says. Outstanding!

Having thoroughly enjoyed 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat' I opted to make this my second Dr. Sacks outing. Once again the good doctor provides compelling, humane, interesting stories about odd physiological conditions and the cultures that foster and contend with them. In multiple episodes that have him traveling to small volcanic islands in Micronesia, the entertaining neurologist studies a group of people who have been born without the ability to see color. Accompanying him is a Nordic specialist in this genetic trait, and one who also happens to share the same condition. As the troupe moves about the islands, they meet and talk with the achromatopes; the natives and Knut evince a feeling of camaraderie. Dr. Sacks plumbs their depths to hear them describe their world in terms of textures and monochrome shades, completely barren of color. Along the way, he experiences a taste of their 'night' lives, the skills they have developed to compensate for their lack of color sight. The next topic in the island hopping takes them to Guam where Sacks sees the patients of an associate who suffer from lytico-bodig, a degenerative condition which causes paralysis [not unlike Dr. Sacks' own neurological patients] and eventual dissolution. Having struck only a certain age bracket on the islands, the mysterious disease has confounded science for almost four decades and has almost killed off its victims. Finally, he treks to Rota to walk among the ancient Cycad plants that have captured his imagination since childhood. This novel appealed to the adventurer's spirit while I was reading it, listening to Dr. Sacks describes the beauty of the island culture and the supremely languid pace of life. Dr. Sacks' writing is not only aesthetically entertaining, but his case studies continue to pique the interest of the intellect. However, one is never so bowled over by the beauty of the surroundings as to forget the real human cases being presented. It is indeed an odd combination, this beauty and tragedy, but one that works very well in this novel producing an enjoyable read.

I adore the quirkiness of Oliver Sacks. Such a multifaceted individual...neurologist, botanist, world-traveller, musically talented, and a bona-fide eccentric of the best kind. I have read nearly all of his books and this is one of the best.

My biggest fault with Sacks is that he can drone on about minutiae in the middle of a scintillating story and lose the interest of his readers. I love a good detailed medical story, and I don't have ADD or anything, but I skipped through many pages of "An Anthropologist on Mars", in spite of the great stories in that book.

In *this* book he keeps the tale lively and doesn't lapse into stupefying detail. It's full of juicy tidbits from a variety of areas: the history and anthropology of the peoples of the Pacific islands, personal anecdotes of the people he meets, a delightful travelogue, descriptions of beautiful ferns and cycad forests, adventure, mystery...

Main story #1: The genetically color-blind people of a small Pacific island. How did they get to be that way? What is it like to live on a small primitive island in a village of color-blind people?

Main story #2: What caused the majority of the population of Guam in the early part of this century to fall ill with a mysterious Parkinsonian-like disease that in some cases wiped out entire families? Oh, and here's the rub...this disease has now almost disappeared. Could it be the cycads? Or not?

Oliver Sacks' writing is very evocative. It combines the scientific and the artistic. The book was possible because that essential element of science was there - curiosity. At the same time there is adventure and romance. Sacks also brings out the fact good physicians are necessarily good humans, and have interests outside medicine. The book has descriptions of people suffering from hereditary complete colour blindness and of the lytico-bodig (the Guam disease), which are clear and allow one to empathize. One need not be a doctor to understand them, just as one need not be a natural historian to understand cycads. In Guam Dr. Sacks visits John Steele, a man who left a brilliant academic career to be an "island GP." That men like Steele exist reaffirms one's faith in medicine. The book left me with the feeling that it was time for me to pack my bags and leave for some similar enlightening adventure.

Destiny's Landfall is a book which I would love to like. A supposedly thorough, comprehensive history of my island of Guam, it seemed too good to be true when I purchased it as an undergraduate. It eventually was too good to be true.

I cannot fault Rogers in terms of his completeness or accuracy, he has taken nearly every text imaginable pretaining to Guam and somehow woven them all together into a narrative of some sort, which is occasionally exciting but ultimately demeaning, archaic and mediocre.

Rogers cannot sustain his own biases for more than a chapter in his text. Beginning with the always questionable "parable of the tribes," which is one of those wonderful little bed time stories that haole people tell themselves in practical and academic forms to soothe their aching consciences and souls. I found myself reiterating time and time again, where is the agency, where is the spirit? Where is the soul of the Chamorro people in this? "Where are they themselves?" I asked myself at times.

It was Victorian Anthropological deja'vu for me, reading a text written today through a mindset of a century ago. The title in itself alludes to the mettle of the text, "destiny's landfall." Sounds something white western and exciting. Of course this all comes at the espense of the indengous inhabitants as this history of Guam celebrates the actions, accomplishments of those luckly losers who made landfall on Guam and gives little attention to those unfortunate people, already on Guam, that they fell upon. The Chamorro people, save for the contemporary sections of the text are painted as little more than mannequins which are placed and posed at the whims of primary texts from European/Western explorers, priests government officials and other washouts. No attempt is made to mitigate the racist writings of the past centuries, the history of Guam is reported as it has always been, of a victimized people, with no power over anything (as destiny the Spanish, Japanese or Americans control them), who somehow have survived, but lost everything in the process.

A point could be made that this is because of the lack of any voice of defense for the Chamorros in the source documents since they were all written by outsiders, however this intimates to less of a hope for objectivity and search for truth by the author, but more for a racist laziness, which would report everything from old Spanish documents, near verbatim, except for where Magellan landed.

I rate this text with a three despite my loathing for it, because the comprehensive nature of it cannot be denied. The rating would be much higher if Rogers had attempted to create a balanced history, implying a new and different voice, one which centered around those that have lived on Guam for thousands of years, rather than its Europeans explorers, tyrannical tourists and lazy lay-overs, rather than retiterating the voice of every Spanish and American Govenror of Guam since time immemorial. But since it did not, the rating is only average, for in spirit it is an average text, anyone could of put this together.

Bob Rogers offers an insightful and gripping view into the history of the island where America's day begins. Rogers' thorough research shows as he takes the reader from the landing of Magellan, right up through the modern day issues and struggles of this tiny, yet action packed island. Roger's fluid style coupled with his amusing stories of such things as "the big, ugly dinnerboat" that sits in Tumon bay, make for a thoroughly enjoyable read. If you are looking for one book that will give you all you need to know about the history of Guam, look no further.

Actually Haven't Read the Book, But Thoroughlly enjoyed The Movie. I'm Gonna Make this Review not a review.I"m Trying to Get contact's of Anybody,with his Authentic or of How to get in Touch with Jeffrey Hunter or His family.I am Mr.Tweed's Grandson.any information would be greatly Appreciated.When any information becomes avaiable. EMail.Thanks. Brian Tweed

I first saw the movie starring Jeffrey Hunter when I was little. It was one of those movies that always came on late at night, but I always stayed up to watch it. I have read the book, and actually own a hardback copy signed by Mr. Tweed himself. I spent 3 years on Guam and visited the sight of his dwelling. I won't call it a cave, because it was just a small living space between two vertical rocks. Amazing he could live there and evade capture for 22 months. It was heartwarming the way the locals protected him from capture, even though some of them paid the ultimate price for doing so. Great story about one mans struggle to survive against heavy odds and how he remained close to those he befriended up until the time of his death.