ALL THE BEST IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC.

By Sydney Clark '12. New York:Dodd, Mead, 1961. 322 pp. $4.95.

If you had a choice between a Grand Tour to Europe and a Grand Tour to the South Pacific, which would it be? If, hemmed in by fears of a great distance and a small purse, you regret that it must be Europe, you may read Sydney Clark and expand. Transportation and meals, hotels and amusements, sand and surf, sunlight and moonlight - they are all much cheaper in the Pacific islands than on the European Continent. Tipping is negligible, and service charges and sojourn taxes do not exist. Furthermore, even when water is drunk in the Islands, the tourist tummies of Spain, Italy, and the Mediterranean countries do not develop. Air fields? They are whooshing up all over.

Sydney Clark is a pleasant combination of romantic and realist, historian and nightclubber, surf bather and museum investigator, shopper and churchgoer, nature worshipper and jet-plane time-table adorer. He can see with a Leica eye and listen like a tape recorder. His sensuous impressions have spiciness both pacific and exhilarating.

The skins of Tahitian girls are cocoa silk. The Fiji Melanesian men wear a golliwog shock of frizzy jet-black hair. At regular intervals flying foxes of New Caledonia get drunk on the blossoms of the arbre jaune, and the duck-billed platypus, plumb crazy, cannot make up its mind whether to be bird, fish, or mammal. A dessert in Tahiti, poe is cooked in papaya flesh, thickened with manioc flour or arrowroot, flavored with vanilla seeds or snips, soused with Martinique rum, wrapped in burao leaves, baked in the shape of a cake, and then finally sprinkled with coconut meal and a bit of sugar. By New Zealand's "Christmas tree," the blazing red pohutukawa, you will probably be serenaded by sharp "clicks" and the treble sounds of a thousand male cicadas. (The females, wonderful to relate, are noiseless.)

In Australia T. S. Eliot's Murder in theCathedral benefits by the perfect cathedrallike Bonython Hall auditorium with Robert Speaight as Thomas a Becket. An American with automobile club papers can join the New Zealand A.A. for $1.47 and be showered with maps, brochures, and services. In Fiji every Wednesday evening a chorus of women does a vakamalolo, a singing meke, seated on a lawn with open-air feasting afterwards offering lovo-cooked food in true mangiti style. An American in Samoa, who is married to a Samoan lady and who has a son married to a Japanese, showed Mr. Clark a snapshort of his grandson and said, "The baby is an absolutely pure-blooded hybrid: Scotch-Swedish-Samoan-Japanese." Maori ear-pendants of greenstone are worn by both men and women in one ear only.

Surfing in Sydney is a major sport practised on a greater scale than at Waikiki. Owing to Methodist influence, Ovalau dancing girls wear toe-length dresses under their grass skirts.

If you cannot be sure what the South Pacific may do for your jangled nerves and your incipient ulcers, consult Sydney Clark. He will purge your mind of sensual dreams of a tropical Utopia and fill it with expectations of an imperfect paradise with which you, a realist and romantic, expansive but not extravagant, can fall in love.