Christina Thompson

Harvard Book Store welcomes CHRISTINA THOMPSON—editor of Harvard Review and award-winning author of Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All—for a discussion her latest book, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.

About Sea People

For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers, they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.

How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.

For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.

Praise

“I loved this book. I found Sea People the most intelligent, empathic, engaging, wide-ranging, informative, and authoritative treatment of Polynesian mysteries that I have ever read. Christina Thompson’s gorgeous writing arises from a deep well of research and succeeds in conjuring a lost world.” —Dava Sobel, bestselling author of Longitude and The Glass Universe

“Who hasn’t stayed up late reading South Sea tales? Christina Thompson’s Sea People is a South Sea tale to top them all—the exploration and settlement of the vast Pacific Ocean by stone-age Polynesians—and every word is true. It’s a compelling story, beautifully told, the best exploration narrative I’ve read in years.” —Richard Rhodes, author of Energy: A Human History and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“Artfully written . . . [Thompson] writes with infectious awe and appreciation about Polynesian culture and with sharp intelligence about the blind spots of those investigating it at different times. This fascinating work could prove to be the standard on the subject for some time to come.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review