As if, just as the global village becomes a global hamlet, an immense forest were to appear beyond the Thank You For Driving Carefully sign, so this is a book that makes the world a larger and stranger place, seeming to collapse history with its foretaste of the end of Eurocentricity. Lost White Tribes may be non-fiction - a history of the white colonists who went native, intermarried and became the lowest rather than highest caste - but it has the mystique of a Ballard or Vonnegut novel.
Haitian Poles with a cult-like anticipation of the Pope's return; Ceylonese Dutch burghers working as waiters and living in crumbling mansions; German slaves in Jamaica: almost too odd to be true, but never objectified, these fossil cultures and the lives of pioneer ancestors are sympathetically treated. Their untold histories would have been extraordinary even without such a fine raconteur as Orizio.