View larger image

Willard Manus's memoir of the thirty-five years he and his Scottish wife and two children spent in the Greek island village of Lindos is one of the very few very good books written about Greece. Its portraits of the villagers and of the foreigners living side by side with them -- people such as the humorist S. J. Perelman, the Pink Floyd band, the novelists Richard Hughes and Martha Gellhorn, among others -- are vivid and memorable. Its description of how Lindos went from island backwater to artists' colony to Aegean mass tourist beauty spot is masterful and insightful, as is its overview of the political, social, and cultural changes in Greece. Best of all is the book's essential charm and humor.