Ensiform's Reviews > Tales of the South Pacific

Superb review. I agree with your comparing this to Remarque's classic. Maybe the lesson is that any work which is made into a popular musical is doomed. Tales of the South Pacific is an overlooked masterpiece.

Thanks for the nice comment! "Overlooked masterpiece" is an apt description, sadly.

I thought this was a great book,and I am a big fan of the musical. But the book is so much more......read Hawaii,and Centennial as well...awesome books. Also liked Texas.

Excellent review,. Love Michener.

Great review. This book gives a wonderful insight into this period of history.

Thanks everyone! I appreciate it. I really ought to read enough of his books, since this one is truly a classic great.

Just wanted to chime in - this review perfectly captures how I feel about this one. Thanks for that! I'm dumbfounded it's not taught regularly myself.

Thank you for your review. I read much of this book with tears in my eyes. My father was a 19 yo Naval gunnery officer in the Pacific at Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Saipan, and several smaller dustups. Twenty-two years later, I was an enlisted Marine, during our problems in Vietnam.

I was disheartened that reviewers found problems with the social views and prejudices in a book written in 1946; they would've been much happier with a politically correct novel portraying the politically correct values of the 21st Century, but James Michener portrayed the morals and values of the heroes of World War II. There was no way for him to anticipate the feeling of our Social Justice Warriors of today, thank goodness! For if he would have, what would we have? It would not be an accurate portrayal of the men who went to war and risked everything, thus enabling the weakest among us to thrive. It was the sacrifice of these young people that kept the beacon of freedom burning in the world. Sure there were weak ones and cowards, but they did it, and did it well.

In respect to the racial prejudice, my father's attitude is similar to that of the narrator of the book. My father is 94. He flew to CA to work with me for a couple of weeks in September. I did the cooking. He was skeptical of my Mexican Cuisine and told me he doesn't eat peppers and onions or spicy foods. However, he ended up enjoying the food and emptied the skillet for his second serving. He said my cooking was the best he had tasted, since the war. I laughed and said, "That's a helluva compliment."

"No you don't understand," he explained the food on ship was the best he had ever eaten in his life, because of a black cook, named Postel.

I asked if that was a first or last name. He said, "That was his only name. He was straight out of the slave culture of Georgia. Some of the guys were mean to him, but I liked him. The officers had specially trained cooks and Postal was the best. I made him a gun captain, on one of our gun batteries, and he said it was the nicest thing anyone did for him during the whole war. When one of the islands was secure, I invited him up to the bridge, to enjoy the magnificent view. He was so proud to be up there, he was beaming, but some floaters drifted by, and he got sick."

"What are floaters," I asked.

My dad looked at me like I was still a kid, to say, "Dead Japs."

This is a part of history, you will never find in a history text, but it is from the everyday experiences of a man who was there. They are disappearing and soon, they will all be gone. We need to collect these vignettes, before they are gone forever. I served with many of these men from WWII and Korea, and asking about such things just wasn't done in those days. You only learned about the details if someone wanted to talk. I waited 70 years for the details from my dad, and only in the last year has he started to tell me about the war. Except for one sentence, over 50 years ago, when he learned I had enlisted in the Marines. "The Marines didn't get across the coral at Tarawa, until the Japs ran out of machine-gun ammo."

I know Michener tightened up his writing style in his later novels, but Tales of the South Pacific is my favorite. Up until recently, The Source was my favorite. Primarily, because I recognized the characters or the composites Michener used; I knew them all. They were real.

Why did I wait so long to read the book?

Maybe it was because I watched the musical when I was a kid. Who would want to read that story? However, the musical was lifted from one chapter, and the profane Bloody Mary was portrayed beautifully, by Michener. It was a great chapter.

You see, young people go to war, and they have the passions and moral dilemmas of people who know their young lives are likely to end in the near future. Knowing you will die without ever falling in love with a beautiful woman, without playing with your own children, without ever getting your chance to make a mark in life, claws at your gut and starts a smoldering fire of resentment, but you do your job. After each firefight, you breathe deeply and think how good it is just to be able to breathe. The fetid air, stinking of death, mud, and filth, never felt so good or smelled so clean. You pray to just survive the next attack and see the morning light.

When these thoughts go through a young man's mind, he will drink and love to excess, whenever he has the opportunity. Michener wrote about it, being as polite and sanitary as possible. He was an officer and a gentleman first and then he became a storyteller. He won the prize, not for his writing style, that improved with each novel, he won the prize because of his portrayal of the passions of young people at war.

The reason this never made it into the curriculum, at least at the high school level, is its frank portrayal of racism, which really ought to be taught, but is opposed on many levels. To Kill a Mocking Bird is as far as most school boards will go - and not all of those.

It's a shame that bureaucracies and committees get to decide what the American public can and can't stomach in its history. We don't need to erect statues glorifying racists, but we also don't need to pretend these things never happened.