It’s interesting to discover which books on New Zealand are are popular with folks outside our country.

The most accurate guide, short of spending a fortune on a custom Nielsen Bookdata report, is probably Amazon.

The top two non-fiction books are the Lonely Planet and Eyewitness Travel guides: no surprise there. But the third bestselling book is Slipping Into Paradise: Why I Live in New Zealand.

It's written by a chap called Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a ‘former Sanskrit scholar and project director of the Sigmund Freud Archives’.

The Amazon website includes a puff piece on Masson’s book from Phil Goff, who should know better. Goff describes Masson's book thus:

Written by someone who clearly loves the country and is prepared to say so, it’s an effective introduction to anyone who wants to know more about a society on the cusp of new beginnings.

Wow. What got Phil's motor running? This is on the inside flap of Slipping Into Paradise:

In the tradition of Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence … For anyone who has ever dreamed of finding utopia, Masson reveals a country where neighbors talk to one another and provide a sense of real community – rarely, outside of the big cities, locking their doors – and where politics are as mellow as the weather … The flora is plentiful. Mangroves, banana plants, papaya trees, and more than ten thousand species of ferns grow wild and freely. The fauna is benign. There are no snakes, tarantulas, or scorpions. Children can walk to school barefoot without a care – there is nothing to sting them, bite them, or give them a rash. In the blue waters near the lush coastline, dolphins and orcas abound.

Now that's a blurb. Enough to drive your average middle-class Dubya-voting American or Kiwi politician into a frenzy.

Slipping Into Paradise was recently reviled reviewed by Paul Little in the Listener, who suggested that Masson move to Botswana.

Then he could spend some 200 pages patronising the inhabitants of that land, in a book as daft as this one.

Ouch!

More than anything, Masson's book illustrates the dangers of well-intentioned 'outsiders' writing travelogues for the benefit of their readers at home. I somehow can't imagine the erudite Michael Palin coming in for such flak on Tibetan literary sites ... but you never know.