James Norman Hall is a man who is forever in search of the romance—the glamour—of life. He has sought it in the trenches, in the flying squadron, in the remote places of the earth. To-day he is seeking it in the earthly paradise of Tahiti and the result is the latest, and, in many respects, the finest of all his books—Mid-Pacific.
To read these essays is to get the pleasure one has in good fiction and something more; a sense of absolute reality and complete understanding of the places and people described. When the book is laid down, one knows the indolent, dream-like life of Polynesia as one knows Paris by reading, not Baedeker, but Balzac. If you wish to escape for a few hours from the hurried jungle of modern-life to the languors of a coral island; if instead of the telephone and tram you prefer to hear only the dim roar of the long Pacific breakers on the outer reefs, here is your magic carpet.
James Norman Hall, author of Mid-Pacific, describes himself as an itinerant journalist and gives his address as Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands. He was born in Iowa and studied at Grinnell and Harvard, but soon stepped forever out of 'the ranks of those who keep office hours and country club lockers.'
He served in France both in the British Army and as a member of the Lafayette Escadrille, and recorded his various war experiences in Kitchener's Mob and High Adventure, and in The Lafayette Flying Corps, which he wrote in collaboration with Charles Nordhoff.
In his previous book On the Stream of Travel, he took the reader on a philosophic journey from America to the little-known islands of the South Seas; in Mid-Pacific, he takes him again to Tahiti, "where," he says, "no one is engaged in joyless work and where one can live according to his own ideas as to what constitutes living."
—from the dust jacket
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