PACIFIC MYSTIQUE

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29856, 23 June 1962, Page 3

PACIFIC MYSTIQUE

The Blue of Capricorn. By Eugene Burdick. Gollancz. 322 pp. In this book Mr Burdick discloses an extraordinarily wide knowledge of the Pacific Ocean. So extensive is his knowledge, it comprehends not only the sea, the islands and atolls, the vegetation and people, the fauna and coral, but a mystique that he perceives the greatest of the oceans to possess. Most of Mr Burdick's days, he says, have been spent on the surface of the Pacific, on its islands or along its shores He does not claim to understand it perfectly—it j s too

vast a place But Burdick's; reader's will surely fee] that he has led them, if not to understanding, at least to better appreciation. He is a perceptive observer of water, wind, land, coral, sky. smells, and of moving creatures, and to observations of each that he records Mr Burdick attaches the little extra that makes him unusual as a storyteller. Mr Burdick’s factual pieces about the characteristics of the Pacific and its peoples are interspersed by fictional stories that are closely associated with the Pacific. These five stories are as uniformly good as the rest of the book.l