Rating: 
Summary: The serpent
Review: I really enjoyed this book. Unlike many of the reviewers, I knew nothing about Pitcairn Island before I read this book. I greatly sympathised with the author, feeling herself an outcast in a narrow-minded society. The reality is that not all people are able to set aside their biases and stereotypes, and this book embraced stereotypes subjectivity. This is not I believe, supposed to be a book about the island itself, but rather about how people react when isolated in one spot and being unable to escape from the prying eyes of others. It really got me thinking what I would do had I been in that situation. And the book started an interest in Pitcairn for me.
Rating:
Summary: THIS ONE TOOK ME RIGHT TO PITCAIRN! AN INTERESTING READ!
Review: I really liked this book, in that it showed a lot of the everyday life of the Pitcairners, which I thought was really fascinating. The author definitely has her problems. All the questions she has about things and why they are happening are easily answered in the minds of the readers. We can tell everything that's going on and why things are going the way they are, but she is truly clueless (that one summed it up well!). The faults she finds in the people around her are really faults in herself which stick out like a sore thumb to the reader. I can't believe how truly warm and kind the people were to her, when she deserved it so little. The family she stayed with were really brought to life by her writing, tho, and were far more likeable than she was. I felt like I got to know them, and was very sad to learn that Ben had died. He had such a beautiful smile. I loved the pictures, and really seeming to live the life on Pitcairn with her for a while, even if it was through the rather tainted author. I loved Irma and Ben and Dennis. (And also Royal Warren, who somehow truly got up the author's nose, so must be a totally cool person!) I truly did enjoy this book, evn though the author had personal problems, she still made QUITE an interesting read for me. (The only time her life was in danger was the times she was doing dangerous things the Islanders did every day. Would be a hard and impossible life for a wimp like me. DREAM ON!!!!!)
Rating:
Summary: THIS ONE TOOK ME RIGHT TO PITCAIRN! AN INTERESTING READ!
Review: I really liked this book, in that it showed a lot of the everyday life of the Pitcairners, which I thought was really fascinating. The author definitely has her problems. All the questions she has about things and why they are happening are easily answered in the minds of the readers. We can tell everything that's going on and why things are going the way they are, but she is truly clueless (that one summed it up well!). The faults she finds in the people around her are really faults in herself which stick out like a sore thumb to the reader. I can't believe how truly warm and kind the people were to her, when she deserved it so little. The family she stayed with were really brought to life by her writing, tho, and were far more likeable than she was. I felt like I got to know them, and was very sad to learn that Ben had died. He had such a beautiful smile. I loved the pictures, and really seeming to live the life on Pitcairn with her for a while, even if it was through the rather tainted author. I loved Irma and Ben and Dennis. (And also Royal Warren, who somehow truly got up the author's nose, so must be a totally cool person!) I truly did enjoy this book, evn though the author had personal problems, she still made QUITE an interesting read for me. (The only time her life was in danger was the times she was doing dangerous things the Islanders did every day. Would be a hard and impossible life for a wimp like me. DREAM ON!!!!!)
Rating: 
Summary: This woman should stay at home!
Review: I was astonished by this book. Ms. Birkett gets to Pitcairn Island by lying through her teeth, and it goes downhill from there. I can't imagine why such a xenophobic, suspicious, self-centered woman would choose to be a travel writer, of all things, but she is. Being already familiar with the whole Bounty/Pitcairn story, I can say that this taught me virtually nothing new, except why the Islanders are so reluctant to have strangers come to live with them. She seduces a married man, accuses another (in her book, not in person) of being a peeping tom (Her only evidence being that he moves quietly, and thus could have snuck up to a window and looked in), and towards the end of the book, and her stay, sinks into a paranoid fantasy that the Islanders may be out to murder her. I don't want to be rude, but Ms. Birkett has some serious problems. I'm sorry the people of Pitcairn Island had to share them. I was so amazed at this book I actually read another by her, to see what it would be like. In "Jella: A Woman at Sea", Ms. Birkett buys elephant ivory (In the 1990's), compares a crew mate to a wet rat, and nearly has a breakdown, suspecting that the crew is sending her a secret message to get off the ship in mid-ocean. The secret message? Michael Jackson's song "Beat It" is played during a party. Like I said, she's got problems.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointment
Review: I was primed and ready when I started--What a great idea for a book, what a fascinating place, what gripping history. Little did I realize, however, that all this would become lost in the hands of one of the least insightful authors I've ever read. Having the emotional maturity of a newborn, she regards Pitcairn's inhabitants with little respect and seems to have arrived on the island with the sole purpose of indulging herself (and the expectation that everyone will likewise cater to her). What a shame that the unique opportunity granted Ms. Birkett was not put to better use. This really could have been a great book.
Rating: 
Summary: Everybody Wants to Go to Pitcairn
Review: I wonder if it's possible to learn about Pitcairn Island and not want to go there. During hectic days when I feel overwhelmed and unappreciated by the endless rat race striving that makes up much of my life, my thoughts turn to the joys and happiness of casting it all away and living on an island far away, a place like Pitcairn. Birkett took such feelings to their logical end by arranging to live on Pitcairn. This book describes her time on the island.As travel writing goes, Birkett's text is interesting. For the community of around 40 people, life on Pitcairn is controlled by the sea and by the smallness of the island. Birkett's text offers a view of a life removed, indeed cutoff, from much of what we consider normal, natural, and expected. The Pitcairn Islanders live in a state of being self-sufficient and at the same time dependent upon the whims of passing ships. In these days when technology seems to draw many of us closer together and to make the world smaller, Pitcairn seems more isolated. There used to be many more ships passing the island in the days before airplanes were in widespread use for Pacific routes. The book is also a study of the difficulties an outsider faces in becoming part of such a community. Birkett reports that she often found herself at a loss to understand the true ins and out of the community. On Pitcairn, as in so many other places, the community has its own code, its own flow, understandable to insiders and baffling to outsiders. In a sense, it's not different from any other community in the world. What makes it different is that Pitcairn is the stuff of legend and the focus of fantasy. Birkett's book is the story of the unfortunate intrusion of reality in the search for Paradise. There is a long tradition of such writing, and the common theme is that "utopia" is, as the derivation of the word itself suggests, "no place." During Birkett's time, she went from being an outsider trying to understand the ins and outs of Pitcairn life to being an outsider vaguely afraid of violence from the islanders. In the end, she was anxiously waiting for the next passing ship to pick her up and take her home. Yet, the dream of Paradise does not die, even though we know that there is no such place, even as the result of experience. In the wee hours, in unexpected moments, we all long for the place that can never be.
Rating: 
Summary: I found this book very interesting
Review: If you are 1) not a resident of Pitcairn Island; 2) not related to anyone on Pitcairn Island; and 3) not a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, I think you will find this to be a very interesting book. I'm glad I read it.
Rating:
Summary: Stupefyingly Inept Writer
Review: Is it possible to write a stultifyingly boring book about a travel adventure to Pitcairn Island? The answer is an unequivocal YES! This book is living proof. The writer - Dea Birkett, remember that name - has absolutely no idea of what makes for an interesting story. She is riveted by trivial details of a sweater, whose nub she carefully describes (this before she even gets to the island), yet seems unable to tell the reader what Pitcairners are like as people, or how they keep from going crazy on their lonely island. She recounts many desultory conversations with islanders, pointless exchanges that go nowhere, yet she has no overarching theme, imparts no lessons (except those the reader can infer). And she completely fails to make the islanders come alive; I couldn't tell them apart, other than by name. Her book reads like a very dull diary by an insipid 14 year old. A cynical editor and publisher calculated there's always a market for a book about Pitcairn. And the cynical author-adventuress was hoping to have a fling and make a buck. There are real writers who can describe everyday life in their own hometowns, and make the story fascinating. This young woman has traveled to the ends of the earth - and she cannot put together a coherent paragraph. The tale, my dear, is in the telling.
Rating:
Summary: A perplexing rant
Review: It was fascinating to read about a place I shall never visit, and people who have developed a way of living and coping with each other on lines paralell but dissimilar to our own. In some ways, this society could almost - but not quite - be compared to a monastic environment in that they are both enclosed and because those understand what is expected of them and behave in a way which respects the boundaries of others. Ms Birkett inveigls her way into this society by deceit, poses as a researcher when she is in fact using this opportunity to record impressions so denigrating that they border on the obcene. Her ill-judged affair with a local married man is (predictably) quickly known by the other islanders (how likely is it that such an affair could be kept secret in a community of 37 people?) and in doing so causes irreparable hurt to the nicest character in the book, a local who tried to court her. My overriding impression was that the author was deeply rooted in the travel writing of the British colonial era - and the assumptions that colonised people are primitive, and their lives to be used - in this case, processed into a book. Writing a book which alleges that the islanders might be trying to murder her is as poisonous, it its way, as plundering natural resources or polluting the land. I hope that the islanders will forget this. My heart goes out to them. Although the author can write and has some occasional flashes of inslight, she is a person with whom I would like to be stranded...
Rating:
Summary: A Glimpse of Paradise!
Review: It's a rare book that calls me to re-read it as soon as I close the final page. Dea Birkett's Serpent in Paradise gave me just that reaction. Anyone who has ever felt even remote interest in the aftermath of the mutiny on HMAV Bounty should find much enlightenment, as well as a few surprises, in reading about the author's experiment in living on Pitcarin Island for several months among the descendents of the mutineers. The book is not without error, contradictions and unanswered questions. The one glaring error deals with the author's transit of the Panama Canal. She states as factual the common misconception that the Canal's locomotives pull vessels through the locks. In fact, transiting vessels move at all times under their own power. The locomotives' function is to keep the vessel centered between the concrete walls of the locks. At times the author contradicts herself. She initially states that "not one of the adult islanders had any of their own teeth left" (p.127). Later she modifies this to: "most had no teeth of their own" (p. 248). Then, near the end of the book, she relates that Pitcairners never touch. "I couldn't remember having seen anyone hold anyone else, not even a mother her baby" (p. 274). And yet, on her first setting foot on the island she was smothered in a hug. "I felt as if I were being bounced off a wall of cushions" (p. 57). Then, on her departure: "One by one, the Pitcairners hugged me..." (p.288). These inconsistencies are probably the result of the author's attempts to coordinate disparate notes made under trying conditions late at night in a fast moving situation. The real teasers are omissions of answers to questions that naturally occur to the curious reader with travel experience. How do the Pitcairners wear their hair, and how do they get it that way? Does each cut his own; do they assist one another, or is there a designated barber? We're told their toilet facilities are out-houses called "duncans." But no mention is made as to whether they have toilet tissue (a product by no means universally known or used by Pacific islanders). The author is not squeamish about subjects potentially more stomach-turning, such as her many spider, rat and maggot observations. Even more puzzling by its absence is how the inhabitants of this small island dispose of what must be thousands of empty tin cans accumulated over the course of a year. Many more pages remain to be written before a true Pitcairn fan will be satisfied. Nevertheless, the book as a whole offers opens many more doors than it leaves closed or ajar. The development of the official language called "Pitkern," derived from a mix of 18th Century British, mixed from the upper class (officers) and the commoners (the crew members), amalgamated with Tahitian pidgin, could be a study in itself. I found myself almost incorporating some of the terms into my own vocabulary! All in all, Ms. Birkett has done a highly creditable job under the most arduous of circumstances. I can only hope she will do a sequel to fill in the blanks, even if it requires her to undertake a return engagement to "paradise."
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