The White Man in the Tree is Mark Kurlansky's very fine first work of fiction, a collection of intriguing, accomplished and often funny short stories. Previously best known for his excellent books Cod (a scholarly but eminently readable history of a fish that turns into a limpid assessment of our environmental vandalism) and The Basque History of the World (an anecdotal, intelligently researched and wonderfully presented history of a marginalised and fascinating people) Kurlansky shows here the same enviable ability to tell as impressive a tale as he does in his non-fiction work. "The White Man in the Tree", the opening novella length story, concerns a cultured Danish filmmaker, his Haitian girlfriend, her family in New York, and their collective misunderstandings, miscommunications and misdirected expectations. Our multicultural world and its continuing parochial misinterpretations feature as themes throughout the other stories, all of which are better than this decent opening gambit for having more sympathetic characters and situations and more compact narratives than the overambitious opener. Particularly good are "The Unclean", the story of a rabbi come to the Caribbean island community of Curaçao off the northwest coast of Venezuela and his mostly fruitless search for kosher food and "Beautiful Mayaguez Women", a story that brilliantly combines Kurlansky's interests in community, identity and the environment. This is a promising first collection from Kurlansky and indicates that his fiction could well become as highly sought after as his compelling history books. --Mark Thwaite