Amazon.com description: Product Description: The island of Tahiti has been a lure for dreamers for more than two hundred years. The rise of literary romanticism in the eighteenth century brought forth a nostalgia for the "primitive". Consequently, accounts of voyages and travels were high among the favorite boos of the time for readers seeking earthly paradises. Still today even the name "Tahiti" is like a bell, tolling the unwary to dreams of an exotic Eden in the far South Seas, where humdrum cares are forgotten and men and women live only for today and each other. The Lure of Tahiti is a collection of eighteen accounts of this "most romantic island in the world" by a diverse group of authors including James A. Michener, Jack London, James Norman Hall, W. Somerset Maugham, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Loti, Herman Melville, James Cook, and William Bligh.