ABSTRACT
The world into which I was born was a slender wisp of coral, a few hundred yards wide and six to ten feet high, enclosing a broad lagoon in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This was Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, and in those days few people had heard of it. I was the first white child to be born there. My sister Joan, born on nearby Ocean Island, was the first white baby the islanders had ever seen.
