Good stories act like a tonic to keep a culture s psychosocial circulatory system flowing.
Unfortunately, this seems to be a point many fiction writers have forgotten in the late part of the last century, an era in which your average literary work has had more to do with onanistic self-expression than with the creation of Zeitgeist. That Changed the World . He is also the author of The Basque History of the World and spent seven years as the Chicago Tribune s Caribbean correspondent. Kurlansky is a keen, witty observer of the intimate details of social politics and is adept at connecting them to world-scale politics. In his first work of fiction, The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories , Kurlansky uses his variegated background and droll sense of humor to good effect, painting pictures of life in small Caribbean nations that make these known places come alive as heretofore undiscovered parallel universes to our own, as vivid and different as anything imagined by H.G. Wells.