Creating Island Resorts.

By Brian E. M. King. London and New York: Routledge (Routledge Advances in Tourism Series). 1997. ix, 286 pp. (Photos, tables, figures.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 0-415-14989-4.

THE MYTH of the tropical island as an "earthly paradise" has long captured the imaginations of (mostly) European explorers and contemporary tourists. In Creating Island Resorts, Brian King examines tropical island resorts as unique communities occupying a postmodern space within regional "pleasure peripheries." Attempting to move beyond narrow marketing or economic analyses, King explores tropical island resorts from many angles and pays particular attention to the social, political and environmental dimensions of resort destinations. King is thus concerned not only with the logistical aspects of packaged tourism in tropical island resorts, but also with the social construction of resorts as sites of pleasure, fantasy, adventure and romance.

Written from the perspective of the Australian tourism market, the book undertakes a comparative analysis using two destination areas: the Whitsunday Islands in Queensland, Australia and the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji. The comparison, although at times difficult due to discrepant economic and social conditions in Australia and Fiji, proves instructive in highlighting how destinations with similar tropical resort infrastructure and imagery compete for "sunlust" mass tourists from the same geographical market (Sydney and Melbourne in this case). Especially interesting is the manner in which the Whitsundays rely on typical images and myths of the South Pacific, despite serving as a domestic, and therefore "unexotic," sun, sea and sand destination.

The book is divided into three parts. The first examines the geographical, historical and political context of the two island groups, including an informative section on the development of mass tourism in each region. In the second part, King provides a detailed glimpse into the tourism industry intermediaries - travel agents, tour operators and airlines - that package, market and sell air-inclusive resort holidays to the Whitsundays and Mamanucas. The final, and undoubtedly most interesting, section is titled the "raw and the cooked" (after Claude Levi-Strauss), and it is here that King expands on the argument that resorts represent postmodern "consumption places" due to the commodification of nature, the cult of individualism and the playful blurring of time and space.

This book deals with a wide range of issues, including consumption, tourism imagery, environmental preservation, indigenous rights, postmodernism and community development. In tackling such a vast body of literature, however, the author devotes insufficient attention to most issues, and ultimately presents a wide-sweeping tourism literature review rather than an ethnographic, empirical examination of individual island resorts. In addition to the quantity-over-quality approach to discussion of theoretical issues, the book suffers from two limitations. First, the most interesting sections of the book deal directly with the comments and attitudes of the "holidaymakers" interviewed in focus groups, and the author should have paid greater attention to inconsistencies in the images, perceptions and actual experiences of tourists. Second, by examining twenty-one individual resorts, the author could provide only limited information on each, and the empirical aspects of the study would have been stronger had the author focused on "thick description" of one or two resorts in each destination area rather than fleeting comments on all twenty-one. The complete lack of discussion regarding the military coups of 1987 in Fiji was also a surprising omission considering the substantial damage caused by the coups to the idyllic touristic image of Fiji.

Notwithstanding these limitations, the book is a well-written examination of two competing tropical destination regions and serves as a useful introduction for anybody interested in the way that tropical island resorts are marketed, sold and indeed "created" by the travel industry.

NICK KONTOGEORGOPOULOS University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada