There is much magic in this book. Its authors, Nordhoff and Hall, take you to a place and time that has vanished from history–the South Seas in the immediate aftermath of World War I. The reader is made wistful for that age of trading schooners plying the waterways among the atolls, reefs, and larger islands of the South Seas. Tahiti is at the center, but the true adventures take place on nearly forgotten atolls populated by less than a hundred people. Places where the myths, legends, and stories of Polynesia still hold sway, albeit under the ever increasing presence of American and European commerce. At the end of the book, Nordhoff and Hall state that the islands have claimed the two permanently. As it happens, this almost turned out to be true. James Norman Hall remained in the South Seas for almost all the rest of his life. Charles Bernard Nordhoff stayed there for two decades.