New on the Bookshelf

“The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific” by J. Maarten Troost (2004, Broadway Books. ISBN 0767915305 — $12.95 paperback, 288 pp.).

A young man follows his aid-worker girlfriend halfway around the world to the South Pacific. He takes up residence in the Republic of Kiribati, on the tiny island of Tarawa. He proceeds to spend the next two years on that “heat-blasted sliver of coral.”

Many are the hardships our protagonist must endure. His diet is limited to fish. The government pursues a policy of “Coconut Stalinism” (“It controls everything. It does nothing.”) And the locals’ taste in music begins and ends with “La Macarena.”

The book’s publishers compare author J. Maarten Troost to Bill Bryson, which is a bit of a stretch. But Troost displays an original style and offers up some laugh-out-loud passages. In case the title got your attention, Troost reports that, on Tarawa, “biting off someone’s nose is an acceptable way to display jealousy.”

“A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan” by Christiane Bird” (2004, Ballantine Books. ISBN 0345468929 — $25.95 hardback, 405 pp.).

Numbering between 25 million and 30 million, the Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic group without an independent state of their own. Their homeland, Kurdistan, is divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

In the United States little is known about the Kurds, yet America looms large in modern Kurdish history as both benefactor and betrayer. More than once, the U.S. Government has encouraged the Kurds to stage a rebellion, then stood by as the uprising was brutally crushed.

Christiane Bird went to Kurdistan, spending most of her time in northern Iraq just before the U.S. invasion. Her travelogue focuses not on landscapes but on the ordinary people she meets. Each has a story to tell, usually one of survival in the face of great suffering. To her credit, Bird inquires about the darker chapters of the Kurds’ story, like their internecine fighting and the “honor killings” of women who have had premarital sex.

News reports tend to reduce the Kurds to an abstract political factor, but this book restores their human face.

“The Rough Guide to the Baltic States” by Jonathan Bousfield (2004, Rough Guides. ISBN 1858288401 — $22.99 paperback, 466 pp.).

Like the Baltic States themselves, the Rough Guides have improved considerably and grown far more colorful in recent years. Newer guides feature photos and a full-color introduction of the can’t-miss sights in each destination.

This frequent Baltics visitor was impressed by the guide’s thorough coverage and reliable assessments. Author Jonathan Bousfield spent almost two years in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and his familiarity with these three very distinct countries shows.

However, the guide is unaccountably lax about indicating prices of accommodation. A few hotel prices are listed, but most are not. It seems thoughtless to list how many cents each museum ticket costs yet give no indication of whether a particular hotel is $60 a night or $200.