Treasure Islands

TALES FROM THE TORRID ZONE Travels in the Deep Tropics By Alexander Frater | Vintage. 384 pp. $14.95

When Alexander Frater returned to his birthplace on Iririki, a tiny South Pacific island, he found that the exotic landscape of his youth had been replaced by a luxury resort whose grounds were "crowned with flowering trees and contoured like a tall polychromic hat." This is among the many surprises he stumbles upon in Tales from the Torrid Zone, his nostalgic tour through the vast, humid swath of land and sea that hovers between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The journey takes Frater, a former chief travel correspondent for the London Observer and the author of Chasing the Monsoon, to dozens of exotic locales -- Tonga, Suriname, Comoro and Zanzibar, to name a few. Like his travels, the narrative meanders, weaving through time and place, as incidents spark memories, and encounters breed musings on local customs, history, science and anything else the author deems relevant. His colorful, if overwrought, observations ("Mountainous and bursting with greenery, Pentecost was so fertile you could imagine a pencil stuck in the ground turning overnight into a leafy twig.") fall together in a way that is impressionistic in the extreme.

DRAGON SEA A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the Coast of Vietnam By Frank Pope | Harcourt. 341 pp. $14

Dragon Sea, Frank Pope's true-adventure tale, has a storyline made for the big screen. A trove of ancient artifacts is discovered in the typhoon-prone waters off the coast of Vietnam. With pillagers threatening, an Oxford archaeologist and a financier put together a team to exhume the loot -- hundreds of thousands of pieces of rare 15th-century Southeast Asian pottery that became known as the Hoi An Hoard. As the expedition gets under way, the plot thickens. Money is tight; the weather is ominous; equipment fails; loyalties among the crew divide; commercial interests clash with academic ones. Pope, a maritime archaeologist and manager of the excavation, may not be a writer by trade, but he is a skillful storyteller with a knack for making the technical understandable and the mundane lively. The heart of the book, a detailed chronicle of the salvage operation, benefits greatly from Pope's expertise and the immediacy of his experience. Dragon Sea doesn't quite have a Hollywood ending many of the recovered relics wound up being auctioned on eBay -- but it nonetheless tells a compelling and educational story about the realities of treasure hunting in the modern age.

From Our Previous Reviews:

* Set in a fictitious South American country, Lost City Radio (Harper Perennial, $13.95), "Daniel Alarc¿n's thoughtful, engaging first novel," Jonathan Yardley wrote, "is a fable for an entire continent, and is no less pertinent in other parts of the world."

* Scott W. Berg's Grand Avenues (Vintage, $15.95) offers "a lively, thorough, fair-minded accounting" of Pierre Charles L'Enfant and the creation of Washington, D.C.," Benjamin Forgey commented.

* Lionel Shriver "creates parallel universes that indulge all our what-if speculations," Mameve Medwed wrote of Shriver's novel The Post-Birthday World (Harper Perennial, $14.95).

* The American banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon is a complex biographical subject "whose faults and virtues loom equally large," Meryle Secrest noted, and in Mellon (Vintage, $19.95), David Cannadine captures that duality, "describing in meticulous detail the personality of someone one can admire and even feel sympathy for, who is nevertheless not very likable."

* In Command of History (Basic, $19.95), by David Reynolds, "adroitly dissects Churchill's second vast war memoir, illuminating how and why it was written and its worth as narrative and chronicle," said Stanley Weintraub.

Nora Krug is a regular contributor to Book World.