Book review : Islands : searching for truth on the shoreline

Abstract

The reference to the shoreline in the title is a giveaway. With decades of travel-related journalism under his belt, BBC Editor Easton delves into a series of thoughtful episodes where he comments about the liminality of islands, tossed about by and between land and sea. Islands are not quite here and not quite there, and Easton throws up for critical inquiry the many dualisms that islands (and islanders) stand for, and the contradictions by which they are defined: here and away, rooted and connected, open and closed, global and local, vulnerable and resilient, traditional and entrepreneurial, obedient and rebellious. As he does so, he sprinkles snippets of island history from around the world that foreground the significant impacts that distinct individuals have had on their societies and futures, on their own islands and beyond. As a long-time island scholar, I found it quite gratifying to come across various concepts developed and entertained in the island studies literature and which seem to have travelled into the mainstream. One of these is that of ‘amplification by compression’ (ABC): a phrase that tries to capture the intense and ‘thick’ social, economic and political universe of (small) island societies, leading to agile decision making (when there is appetite for it) and casting into doubt claims that suggest that small islands are handy microcosms of larger continental spaces. [excerpt]