Barbara Moss's Reviews > Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island

A slow start to the author's year as a volunteer with World Teach, based on one of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. He didn't cope well with his initial disappointment at a less than enthusiastic welcome, and then at the state of the school and lack of enthusiasm of his students. Even after making friends and learning the language, he often felt excluded because no one told him about major events on the island.

The tone of the book becomes a bit more positive, and more informative, when he describes the election campaign, and the policies of the main parties, discussing the fate of the island and people of Bikini after its use as a nuclear testing ground, and the dangers that global warming is likely to make the low, flat island of Ujea, where he was based, uninhabitable. He still found life on the isalnd "more interesting than pleasurable". After finishing the year, he returns as an anthropolgist, writing a doctoral thesis on public perceptions of climate change on the islands.