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Borneo. Jewel in a Jade Rainbow, Letters and Legends from North Borneo Sabah. By DAVID and SUE FIELDING. Kota Kinabalu: Koisaan Cultural Development Institute, 1998. Pp. xiv, 444. Photos, Maps.

Historian friends tell me that it is nearly impossible to find a publisher for a colonial memoir. What a pity, especially if the memoir is as engagingly told as this delightful book. Jewel in a Jade Rainbow is not a work of analytical reflection, but an illustrated chronicle of people, places, and daily events conveyed with all the immediacy of letters written to parents and friends at home, diary entries, snapshots, district tour reports, shipboard menus, official circulars, and picnic and sporting day programs. It covers a highly eventful period -- sadly neglected by academic historians -- the final years of British colonial rule in Sabah.