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Just one month after his 21st birthday, Peter Rudiak-Gould moved to Ujae, a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands located 70 miles from the nearest telephone, car, store, or tourist, and 2,000 miles from the closest continent. He spent the next year there, living among its 450 inhabitants and teaching English to its schoolchildren.

At first blush, Surviving Paradise is a thoughtful and laugh-out-loud hilarious documentation of Rudiak-Gould’s efforts to cope with daily life on Ujae as his idealistic expectations of a tropical paradise confront harsh reality. But Rudiak-Gould goes beyond the personal, interweaving his own story with fascinating political, linguistic, and ecological digressions about the Marshall Islands. Most poignant are his observations of the noticeable effect of global warming on these tiny, low-lying islands and the threat rising water levels pose to their already precarious existence.

An Eat, Pray, Love as written by Paul Theroux, Surviving Paradise is a disarmingly lighthearted narrative with a substantive emotional undercurrent.

Witty and Captivating

This book became more and more engaging the further I got into it. I enjoyed the author's insights into his experiences with trying to learn and relate to the island's culture. Some of my favorite parts included his changes in perspective as he was able to start to view the world from a context much different than his own.

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A Marshall lsland Memoir

Peter Rudiak-Gould is twenty one years old, fresh from teacher's college, when he decides to be a volunteer English teacher for a year on Ujae. Ujae is part of the Marshall Islands - a very tiny part - 1/3 of a square mile to be exact. And the school - officially one of the worst in the Pacific.

"...an idea that there was a place so far from everything, so tiny and little known, where men still fished with spears and women still healed with jungle medicine. It was a place unknown and therefore, maybe, perfect...I wanted Ujae to be my far-off paradise."

When Peter steps foot on the atoll, his dream collides with reality. He is not greeted with a welcoming committee as he had imagined. As he settles in for his first night with his host family - "I considered my situation. I was already lonely to the point of physical pain. I had been ignored and welcomed, avoided and stared at, indulged and deprived. All I had learned was that I knew nothing."

I think I really enjoyed this book because of Rudiak-Gould's complete honesty in writing it. Having exposed his naivete in the first two chapters he goes on to candidly document both his observations, feelings and emotions for the remainder of his year. (Yes he lasts the entire year!)

Marshallese society is much different than the North American version Peter grew up with. Children are pretty much on their own from age 4 on. Schooling is not given great importance - this is quite frustrating to Peter. Interaction between child and parent is limited. Indeed, Peter is the only adult who plays with the children. Elders are revered. Peter is being treated well by the Ujae people, but because it differs from his North American expectations, it takes him a bit to figure out the social nuances of social interaction.

"Living in another country had finally made me realize how much I was a product of my own country."

He perseveres and participates in fishing expeditions, festivals, makes friends and learns to speak and write the Marshallese language. (He has since written a Marshallese language textbook)

As for the subtitle? Ujae atoll is in danger of being swamped by the raising ocean levels. Indeed global warming is a threat to much of the Marshall Islands. Rudiak-Gould is currently working on his doctoral thesis, studying indigenous reactions to the threat of climate change.

Surviving Paradise is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, educational, but above all eye opening. I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir!

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Honest, engaging and engrossing

Surviving Paradise is a great read; interesting, funny and it makes you care deeply. I too was a WorldTeach volunteer on an outer island and reading Peter's account of his experiences brought so much back from my own time in the Marshall Islands. Things I had forgotten about, things I remember fondly as well as all the challenges that came with it. He did a great job expressing what must have been every volunteer's struggles in coping with living in a foreign country and the joys and disillusions of (our perception of) paradise.

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Surviving Paradise

This is a very engaging book about one man's year on a small atoll in the Pacific, Ujae, population 450. The author is there to teach English but he's the stellar student: learning Marshallese, the rhythms and customs of his atoll's community, how to spear fish when food supplies get low, how to deal with island fever, and much more. In one part of the book you find that there's an annual celebration to commemorate the arrival of Christianity. Rudiak-Gould is cast into the role of the historic priest, and he obliges by standing in a small boat that gets carried into church in which the highlight is the unfurling of the boat's sail--which is covered with dollar bills. Not only does he come across as a good sport, he puts these experiences to good intellectual use. He lets you see his own adept navigation around beautiful intellectual islets: the idea of untouched paradise and its hold on the imagination; how he thinks about cultural relativism in the context of his own values; the meaning and maintenance of privacy when there is very little of it; how conflicting ideas can coexist within the same person, and more. In the epilogue, three years have passed and he returns to the islands. He sees that global warming has created some noticeable changes on the atoll. After 2000 years, rising sea levels may make these islands uninhabitable in the next century. The scenes of the book then stand out like rich documentary photographs.

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WOW

Wow. I don't think I impress very easily, but you get a "wow, Peter"
Honesty, intelligence, breeding, and the whatever is you you-ness just all combines
wonderfully in this book. And wisdom. One doesn't expect wisdom from one of such tender
years, but you stumbled all around that garden, too.

Thanks, congratulations, and good luck to you with this and wherever it takes you
on the great ocean of all things.

Howie Gordon,
Berkeley, CA.

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