"The book is blessed with an intrinsically interesting subject matter: the way in which the religious basis of societies all across Polynesia was suddenly torn up and deliberately rejected within a decade or two. The author succeeds in highlighting how extraordinary and dramatic the 'Polynesian Iconoclasm' was, drawing our attention to it as a coherent phenomenon, and penetrating these convulsions more deeply than other scholars have managed hitherto." - Alan Strathern, University of Oxford

"The book is an ethnographic tour de force describing in great detail the conversion to...