Obeah

Rating:
Summary: This book is racsist and ethnocentric, and not about Obeah
Review: The authors both went to Trinidad for Mr Rapp's,the writer, business trip. During this trip Mrs. Rapp came across Obeah. During the span of a business trip she appoints herself as a well learned authority on the subject, when others have been studying this African religion for years and still feel that it is a well-kept, secret art. This book is filled with sterotypes of voodoo and other Caribbean "witch-doctor" religions, as "pure evil". These religions are beautiful and sacred, but misunderstood because they were once used to poison the European slave owners. Upon finding the cause of the poisonings they denounced the religion as unlawful and promulgated that Obeah was pure evil in order to stir up hatred and fear of the religion and those who practice it.
As for a scince fiction horror story it becomes drawn out and boring after the first chapter. It is extremely repetetive, and predictable, thus lackings suspense.
This book is extremely racist.The authors often comment that the darker skinned people are ugly and stupid. At the beggining he made some disparaging remarks about Indians who were too dark, almost as dark as the black people or Negroes as he often refered to Trinidadians of African descent. The book was written in the mid 1980s there is no excuse for using such a term. And of course, the Americans are smarter and stronger, basically better than the Trinidadians in every way. Well, that is the veiwpoint of the American authors.