Ghosts of Makara

About the Book

Ghosts of Makara: Growing up Down-Under in a lost world of yesteryears, is the moving memoir of a son of an Irish-German immigrant family growing up during the 1920s and the Depression-wracked '30s in a wind-blasted, yet picturesque, Pacific corner of colonial New Zealand. Makara Beach could have been Middle-Earth of the Lord of the Rings, the Academy Award-winning movie which 70 years later used Makara as one of its filming locations. In this sepia-tinted, nostalgic, first-person family album, the author evokes a lost era Down Under, one without television, the Internet, or (early on) even radio, when he and his younger brothers and sisters acted out their own stories and dreamed their own dreams. It was truly a different world, where barefoot Bobbits grew up with a deep love of nature and respect for family--a world we can learn much from today.

About the Author

Bernard Diederich grew up as one of those barefoot Bobbits in Makara Beach. Fittingly--given the fact that his European forebears had arrived in New Zealand via sailing ships in the 19th century--Diederich himself sailed away, at age 16, as a cabin boy on a majestic, four-masted vessel, the PAMIR. His wanderlust brought him plenty of adventure. During World War II Diederich served with the U.S. Merchant Marine in the Pacific Theater aboard tankers carrying high-octane aviation gasoline. After the war he turned to journalism, first as publisher of an English-language newspaper in Haiti, and later as a foreign correspondent for TIME Magazine covering the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America. His previous books include Papa Doc, the Truth About Haiti; The Death of the Goat (about the assassination of Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo); and Somoza: Legacy of U.S. Involvement in Central America. Today Diederich makes his home in Florida, where the breezes are kinder than the howling gusts of Makara Beach, and the living is easier.