The Convict and the Colonel

"A superb calaloo of a book whose ingredients of autobiography, historical narrative and the anthropologist's pursuit of the origin of folk memories reconstruct the life of a Martinique fishing village. Richard Price has a remarkable grasp of the literatures of the Caribbean, and draws on this resource to explore the underlying insanity of the colonial experience, as well as the bewildering complexities of the post-colonial world where memory is erased or invented according to the demands of a market modernity." --George Lamming, author of In the Castle of My Skin, Natives of My Person, The Pleasures of Exile, Season of Adventure "A wonderfully readable fusion of anthropology and memoir about culture, colonialism, and madness in the Caribbean. Price practices what a lot of postmodernists preach; the book's graceful writing and innovative form, tossing the reader back and forth in time and space, is supported by solid and original scholarship." --Lucy R. Lippard, author of Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America "By beautifully crafting elements as disparate as biographical data, sociological studies, literary sources, and archival documents, Richard Price's research is more fascinationg than a piece of fiction." --Maryse Condé, author of I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Crossing the Mangrove, and The Last of the African Kings "An engrossing and compelling book. . . . Richard Price continues to build a body of work that in seriousness and self-revelation goes beyond even the work of Clifford Geertz. But he is more than an anthropologist and stylist; he is a moralist, one who demands to be taken seriously. He enters the discussion of modern culture with Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques but he is able to carry it further than the master, because he has kept his intellectualizing anchored in the experience of cultural and social difference." --Roger D. Abrahams, author of Singing the Master and Afro-American Folktales "Price does it again. Mixing eras, genres and voices, he carries the reader through the contradictory streams of historical consciousness in the Caribbean island of Martinique. The result is as complex and as enticing as the sea it evokes." --Michel-Rolph Trouillot, author of Silencing the Past