Was there ever a more romantic title than "White Shadows in the South Seas?" The book sold like hotcakes in the early 1920s and a movie of it won an Oscar in 1928. I suspect, however, that a lot of the popularity of the book was due to photographs of undraped Polynesian women and hints of sexual delights. One of the female characters is named "Vanquished Often." This is pretty racy for 1921, the stuff that escapist dreams were made of after the horrors of World War I.
Well, unfortunately, "White Shadows" while not a bad book is not a very good book either. It's about a visit the author made to the remote Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. He meets a lot of bizarre characters and tells us of them at length -- and I have a feeling he told a few "stretchers" as Huck Finn would say. There's plenty of colorful descriptions of scenery that is in truth spectacular, and stories of some of the people who have visited the Marquesas, including Herman Melville and Paul Gauguin. O'Brien gives the reader a good dose of history and folklore.
I've had "White Shadows" and its companion volume "Mystic Isles of the South Seas" on my bookshelf for about 40 years. The titles are too evocative and the books too romantic to throw away. The photographs are pretty decent too, although not as revealing as some of Marquesan women in "The National Geographic" of the same epoch. So, buy the books and look at the pictures, read a bit of the purple prose, and dream of an Island maid named Vanquished Often.
Smallchief