content: If you've read the responsible histories of the Pacific War, Michener's 1946 book offers and all together different take of that event--a home-front view, as it were, more civilian, and provincial, in character than military. It brings back a time when the islands of the South Pacific were once merely vague dot in the ocean with strange names and even stranger people. And it's not often that World War 2 is turned into musical comedy.