Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island

Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island

• Used Book in Good Condition

<DIV><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Just one month after his 21st birthday, Peter Rudiak-Gould moved to Ujae, a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands located 70 miles from the nearest telephone, car, store, or tourist, and 2,000 miles from the closest continent. He spent the next year there, living among its 450 inhabitants and teaching English to its schoolchildren.</p><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">At first blush, <I>Surviving Paradise</I> is a thoughtful and laugh-out-loud hilarious documentation of Rudiak-Gould’s efforts to cope with daily life on Ujae as his idealistic expectations of a tropical paradise confront harsh reality. But Rudiak-Gould goes beyond the personal, interweaving his own story with fascinating political, linguistic, and ecological digressions about the Marshall Islands. Most poignant are his observations of the noticeable effect of global warming on these tiny, low-lying islands and the threat rising water levels pose to their already precarious existence.</p><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">An <I>Eat, Pray, Love</I> as written by Paul Theroux, <I>Surviving Paradise</I> is a disarmingly lighthearted narrative with a substantive emotional undercurrent.</P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"></P></DIV><P> </P>