Rascals in Paradise

In a thrilling collection of nonfiction adventure stories, James A. Michener returns to the most dazzling place on Earth: the islands that inspired Tales of the South Pacific. Co-written with A. Grove Day, Rascals in Paradise offers portraits of ten scandalous men and women, some infamous and some overlooked, including Sam Comstock, a mutinous sailor whose delusions of grandeur became a nightmare; Will Mariner, a golden-haired youth who used his charm to win over his captors; and William Bligh, the notorious HMS Bounty captain who may not have been the monster history remembers him as. From lifelong buccaneers to lapsed noblemen, in Michener and Day’s capable hands these rogues become the stuff of legend.
 
Praise for Rascals in Paradise
 
“The best book about those far-scattered islands that has appeared in a long time . . . a portfolio of rare and ruthless personalities that is calculated to make the curliest hair stand straight on end.”—The New York Times
 
“[Combines] research and scholarship (A. Grove Day was a professor at the University of Hawaii) with a gift for spinning a yarn and depicting character (Michener, journalist and novelist, needs no introduction).”—Kirkus Reviews

James A. Michener was one of the world’s most popular writers, the author of more than forty books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific, the bestselling novels The Source, Hawaii, Alaska, Chesapeake, Centennial, Texas, Caribbean, and Caravans, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.
 
A. Grove Day was a prolific author, teacher, and scholar of Hawaii and the South Pacific who wrote or edited more than fifty books. Born in Philadelphia and educated at Stanford University, where he befriended John Steinbeck, Day was also one of the co-founders of Pacific Science: A Quarterly Devoted to the Biological and Physical Sciences of the Pacific Region. Many of his works, including Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii and Best South Sea Stories, remain local bestsellers in Hawaii. He died in 1994 at the age of eighty-nine.