Tuesday, 2 July 2019
Sunday, 30 June 2019
Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed (Social Science) by Kathy Marks
Hardback: Pitcairn Island - remote and wild in the South Pacific, a place of towering cliffs and lashing surf - is home to descendants of Fletcher Christian and the Mutiny on the Bounty crew, who fled there with a group of Tahitian maidens after deposing their captain, William Bligh, and seizing his ship in 1789.
Shrouded in myth, the island was idealized by outsiders, who considered it a tropical Shangri-La. But as the world was to discover two centuries after the mutiny, it was also a place of sinister secrets. In this riveting account, Kathy Marks tells the disturbing saga and asks profound questions about human behaviour.
In 2000, police descended on the British territory - a lump of volcanic rock hundreds of miles from the nearest inhabited land - to investigate an allegation of rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. They found themselves speaking to dozens of women and uncovering a trail of child abuse dating back at least three generations.
Scarcely a Pitcairn man was untainted by the allegations, it seemed, and barely a girl growing up on the island, home to just forty-seven people, had escaped. Yet most islanders, including the victims' mothers, feigned ignorance or claimed it was South Pacific "culture" - the Pitcairn "way of life."
The ensuing trials would tear the close-knit, interrelated community apart, for every family contained an offender or a victim - often both. The very future of the island, dependent on its men and their prowess in the longboats, appeared at risk. The islanders were resentful toward British authorities, whom they regarded as colonialists, and the newly arrived newspeople, who asked nettlesome questions and whose daily dispatches were closely scrutinized on the Internet.
The court case commanded worldwide attention. And as a succession of men passed through Pitcairn's makeshift courtroom, disturbing questions surfaced. How had the abuse remained hidden so long? Was it inevitable in such a place? Was Pitcairn a real-life Lord of the Flies?
One of only six journalists to cover the trials, Marks lived on Pitcairn for six weeks, with the accused men as her neighbours. She depicts, vividly, the attractions and everyday difficulties of living on a remote tropical island. Moreover, outside court, she had daily encounters with the islanders, not all of them civil, and observed firsthand how the tiny, claustrophobic community ticked: the gossip, the feuding, the claustrophobic intimacy and the power dynamics that had allowed the abuse to flourish.
Marks followed the legal and human saga through to its recent conclusion. She uncovers a society gone badly astray, leaving lives shattered and codes broken: a paradise truly lost.
Lost Paradise: From Mutiny on the Bounty to a Modern-Day Legacy of Sexual Mayhem, the Dark Secrets of Pitcairn Island Revealed is a 2009 non-fiction book by Kathy Marks about the Pitcairn sexual assault trial of 2004.
About the author: Kathy Marks is a British journalist best known for her work on The Independent.
Marks grew up in Manchester, England, and studied languages. A journalist since 1984, her first job was at the Reuters news agency; she has also worked for the Daily Telegraph. She has covered the 1999 East Timorese crisis, the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, the insurgency in Aceh (a civil war in Indonesia), the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, and the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake. Marks became The Independent's Asia-Pacific correspondent based in Sydney, Australia, in 1999. Marks covered the Pitcairn sexual assault trial of 2004 on and off that Pacific island and wrote a book on the subject.
In 2013, she won a Walkley Award in the Indigenous Affairs category for her essay 'Channelling Mannalargenna' in The Griffith Review.
Friday, 28 June 2019
Wednesday, 26 June 2019
Tuesday, 25 June 2019
Monday, 24 June 2019
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
Paperback: Celestial Bodies (2010, 2018) is set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada.
These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present.
Elegantly structured and taut, Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses and loves.
Celestial Bodies won the Man Booker International Prize 2019 and the 2010 Best Omani Novel Award.
The book is translated from the Arabic by Professor Marilyn Booth.
About the author: Jokha Alharthi is the first Omani woman to have a novel translated into English, and Celestial Bodies is the first book translated from Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. Alharthi is the author of two previous collections of short fiction, a children’s book, and three novels in Arabic. Fluent in English, she completed a PhD in Classical Arabic Poetry in Edinburgh, and teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. She has been shortlisted for the Sahikh Zayed Award for Young Writers and her short stories have been published in English, German, Italian, Korean, and Serbian.
About the translator: Marilyn Booth holds the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, Oxford University. In addition to her academic publications, she has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic, most recently The Penguin's Song and No Road To Paradise, both by Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud.
Rating: 4/5
Sunday, 23 June 2019
Wednesday, 19 June 2019
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