PositiveAir MailDeeply reported ... Vaillant is a skilled longform journalist, and one senses the shape of a leaner, more agile account of perhaps 30,000 words at the heart of this hefty tome. During the most self-indulgently intellectual sections... and some of the more meandering first-person accounts, I found myself yearning for the abridged version. But, overall, the drama of the unfolding action and the righteous anger of the polemic concealed within are engrossing.
Matthew Green
PositiveThe Times (UK)The account of the ruins’ archaeological uncovering in the 20th century is diverting enough, but details of the lost village and its culture are too sketchy to be truly moving; perhaps inevitably the most interesting chapters focus on later eras, where the most information and certainty are to be found ... Green’s sites are sometimes well known. The story of St Kilda, the remote Scottish island finally evacuated by its cliff-scrambling, fulmar-eating inhabitants in 1930, has been extensively covered. But he takes a wider view, offering thought-provoking historical context, notably a discussion of the fetishisation of the \'noble savage\' and the islanders’ knowing exploitation of their prelapsarian public image as they learnt to play-act naivety for tourists ... At points, the academic voice overpowers the narrative, but before the general reader is overcome, Green’s passion and historical vision bursts from the page, summoning up the past in surround sound and sensual prose.
