The Missionaries edition by Owen Stanley Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : The Missionaries edition by Owen Stanley Literature Fiction eBooks 
The Missionaries is a story of the collision of three cultures. A brilliant tale of ineptitude, self-righteousness, and human folly, it combines the mordant wit of W. Somerset Maugham with a sense of humor reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse.
When Dr. Sydney Prout is named the head of the United Nations mission to Elephant Island, he believes he is more than ready to meet the challenge of guiding its primitive inhabitants into the post-Colonial era, and eventually, full independence. But neither his many academic credentials nor the Journal of Race Relations have prepared Dr. Prout to reckon with the unrepentant bloody-mindedness of the natives, or anticipate the inventive ways their tribal philosophers will incorporate the most unlikely aspects of modern civilization into their religious lore and traditional way of life.
Author Owen Stanley is an Australian explorer, a philosopher, and a poet who speaks seven languages. He is at much at home in the remote jungles of the South Pacific as flying his Staudacher aerobatic plane, deep-sea diving, or translating the complete works of Charles Darwin into Tok Pisin.
The Missionaries edition by Owen Stanley Literature Fiction eBooks
A clueless UN bureaucrat tries to modernize a remote tribe while an old colonial administrator opposes him. The way the bureaucrat reinterprets everything to fit his academic theories will leave you rolling on the floor; it's like the guy couldn't see what was in front of him.Product details
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The Missionaries edition by Owen Stanley Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
The Missionaries is a rollicking good read about a Pacific island paradise invaded by U.N. apparatchiks determined to turn stone age tribes into Oxford undergraduates...One man stands in their way, a crude, boisterous, and powerful figure with a resemblance to George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman....But can one man, and a few drunken compatriots, stop the insanity???
This book started a little slow for me, but once it started capturing my attention I finished very quickly. The pacing of the book makes sense once you get to the end - it's like a train that has to build up some steam before getting up to speed. The book ends before really slowing down, which is both satisfying and not (satisfying because we really don't need a full resolution, but not because it's just starting to get really good).
The prose is full of both subtle and biting satire. You can probably surmise from other reviews that it's not very liberal-friendly (a good thing, since most books are these days). So if you get frustrated by typical uneducated stupidity in the global environment, like "if those people just had X knowledge or Y technology, they'd be saved," then you will appreciate this story. And because of that, it feels real. You will physically feel frustration at the "missionaries" and their statements about the indigenous people. And you will feel satisfied, because the story itself feels like a brothers-in-arms situation where you feel like someone finally "gets" you. In a world where most don't see the condescension in how we so often handle the developing world and the stupidity in the assumptions we make about it, this book leaves it exposed wide.
Rating 4.5 stars, because it's a satisfying read with some minor issues with pacing and timeline in some parts. But it's definitely worth the time to read.
This could be the modern Animal Farm about the UN and Progressives. The certainty of these UN missionaries in the righteousness of what they do is astounding with predictable results. "...passing through a phase of transitional disequalibrium, in which a centrifugal shift of the locus of interaction is producing a redeployment of social forces" explains away the violence of the native Moroks. The drafting of their Constitution, the unintended consequences of social tinkering, new sanitation rules that are embraced with vigor, the smugness of the UN people there to help...it's all a great send up of Progressive myopia. Good parody, humorous and off-putting at the same time.
I was laughing out loud by the second paragraph of this astoundingly funny book.Some of the laughs are cheap, like explanation of hw an island without elephants got the name Elephant Island. Some of the laughs are real insights to human nature. All of them are real.
The book covers the arrival of a UN decolonization mission to Elephant Island, an Australian territory somewhere in the South Seas The story takes place (and was obviously written in) the 1970s. The ham-handed efforts of the UN mission to develop a national government for the local tribesmen is hampered by two limitations. They basically never even meet the locals except at the one White settlement near the airstrip, and their religious doctrine of racism, colonialism and keep them from honestly assessing any situation they come across.
The writer is willing to take people as they are, and show them to you in all their silly self-important glory. If you don't love this book, it's because you hate humanity.
Fun satire on post-colonial nonsense. The native Moroks and the UN humanitarians are locked in mutual incomprehension, but the UN folks are just that crucial bit dumber. Not a major work of literature, but first rate entertainment. Well constructed and very well written, and populated by characters who may be exaggerated, but are living and distinct human beings. The UN people can be a bit flat, especially the Americans, but the rest are real and the Melanesian characters are fascinating.
I could easily be wrong, but my impression is that this was written in the 1970s or possibly the 1980s, and didn't find a publisher until recently.
A former island outpost of the British Empire then Australia is to transition from rule by "old school realist" colonial officials to independence. A group of idealistic but hopelessly naive UN administrators come in to administer the change in government. Hilarity ensues due to clashes of culture and world views. This is the first book Douglas Adams (Hitch Hikers Guide fame) would have written if he were a United Nations filed worker in the 3rd world or a Peace Corps volunteer.
A clueless UN bureaucrat tries to modernize a remote tribe while an old colonial administrator opposes him. The way the bureaucrat reinterprets everything to fit his academic theories will leave you rolling on the floor; it's like the guy couldn't see what was in front of him.
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