Mad Professor

In Searching for Paradise, author Thurston Clarke travels to about a dozen islands all over the world, including the one on which the sailor who was the basis for Robinson Crusoe was a castaway, as well as tropical and even arctic islands. He visits these microcosms as an attempt to discover what the allure of living on an island is (the medical term is islomania). He never fully answers the question, but it doesn't matter. The book is both thought-provoking and marvelously escapist.

Excerpt:

San Juan had no venerable government buildings, historic churches, or large buildings. Everyone looked to the sea for their living, depending on the lobsters that could bring twenty dollars in a Santiago restaurant. A century before, the islanders had simply tossed chunks of goat meat along the shore and attracted swarms of lobsters. The lobsters had since become more scarce and it was agreed that if they ever disappeared, so would San Juan. Meanwhile, it was as silent and lonely as a community of six hundred people could be. Lights twinkled at dusk, but the only people about were children gathered in a bar to watch the owner burn warts off his daughter's knee, and a half dozen adults enjoying a favorite evening ritual, watching the red hummingbirds drink nectar from bell-shaped yellow flowers. When night fell, the streets emptied, except for a boy kicking a soccer ball through the supports of a gong, the island's only fire alarm.

I ate cold lobster, alone, in the Villa Green, surrounded by polished wooden sideboards and wall calendars, and listening to the click of a pendulum clock. I read in the hotel guest book about "life-long ambitions fulfilled," bird-watchers who had "come for the hummingbirds but found so much more," and the joy of the world's most traveled disabled person to find himself, at last, on "the famous island of Robinson Crusoe."

$19 on Amazon.com