Reviewed by Richard West
Recall the popular chin-stroking adage about Hong Kong when the British returned it to the Chinese in 1997: "past imperfect, present tense, future conditional." It immediately came to mind regarding Sri Lanka after I finished reading Not Quite Paradise, Adele Barker's interesting account of living and teaching on the pearl-shaped island 22 miles south of India.
During the last 40 years big events have come snapping down on Sri Lanka like the bars of giant mousetraps: a devastating civil war that had claimed 40,000 lives by 2001 and the horrific tsunami, resulting from the Sumatran earthquake, that hit the island on December 26, 2004, killing upwards of 35,000 people. For this largely Buddhist country, Karmageddan indeed.
