This book had clear pictures, and the directions/explanations were quite clear/easy to understand. Also, it has a set of beads and the stuff you need with it, so that makes it easier, instead of having to go around the shops and searching for what you need, and if u don't find it, there won't be a use of buying the book anyway! I think that it's great - but there should be more designs for other types of jewelry.. but, overall, u're probably gonna find this book good enough.

I read this book in 1982. It is very good way to see China.

The word "idiosyncratic" was invented for books like this one. It is supposed to be about a particular cargo cult or new religion of the southwest Pacific, one of many that sprang up in response to the painful contact with Europeans from mid-19th century on. Let me say right off, if you are a student or teacher of anthropology and you need a serious book for your term paper or for preparing a class, you would be far better off looking at Peter Lawrence's "Road Belong Cargo", Peter Worsley's "The Trumpet Shall Sound" or Burridge's "Mambu". There might be some newer works to choose as well. The reason for doing so is that you will get a better grasp of the historical and cultural roots of cargo movements and the political tremors they caused for various administrations. The authors link these movements to larger tendencies in human history in a clearer way.

Edward Rice has a readable, but sometimes very annoying style. I instinctively dislike books in which the author tosses off terms like "frogs", "Frenchies", "Russkies", "krauts", "Japs", "sambo", "Kanaka", and "various types of Chows" !! And that might not be the complete list. OK, he has an ironic tone throughout, he professes sympathy with colonized peoples, and he describes his own book as a polemic, but I don't care, it smacks of those insensitive people who say "Some of my best friends are Jewish." and then tell a rotten joke about money-grubbing Jews. The author states that his work is neither anthropological or sociological, trying to distance himself from "the dreaded academic", but he has to turn to them willy-nilly, because he's discussing the same things and he hasn't got the background to stand on his own. We get a potted history of white contacts in the Western Pacific, of colonial rule and its missionary corollary, (with excerpts from missionary memoirs) and a short picture of life in the New Hebrides in the early 1970s (the place became independent Vanuatu in 1980).

However, don't dismiss JOHN FRUM HE COME totally. What I liked about this book is that the author kept an open mind towards the cargo religion. He did not ridicule it or search for inconsistencies or blow it off as 'meaningless'. He genuinely tried to show the Cargo religion of Tanna island from the believers' point of view, even if that might not be possible for a foreigner. He understood that all religions begin as mixtures of ideas from different times and places and that to an outsider, they may seem incongruous. New religions in the process of forming are still religions for all of that, to be taken seriously. Rice saw the myth and poetry, acknowledged the deeply-felt belief, and understood the soil of despair and oppression from which the John Frum religion arose. Through this effort, he certainly raised himself in my eyes (for whatever that's worth). You might try reading the last 13 pages first; you will better swallow the sometimes-puerile style of the rest of the book.