From the moment of picking up this book, with its arresting cover art of a Uranium-235 Atom Model and its introductory chapter “It Was the Sound That Terrified Us,” there is a clear sense that stories of trauma and suffering await the reader. This is an ambitious work, covering around seventy-five years of history and music in the Marshall Islands, a volatile period of nuclear activity and experience, the resonance of which is far from over. The author Schwartz frames the work within “a politics of silence and sound,” drawing as much attention to the “conspicuous manipulation of silence” as it does to the sounds of Marshallese musical culture (5).

The book is organised into five chapters, and an introduction, of equal length. The Introduction is densely theoretical: a sophisticated consideration of music and gender, power, race, and decolonisation in the context of the Marshall Islands. Chapter One provides a detailed discussion of the politics of radiation and the complex relationship between the United States of America and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI); there are strong assertions here on the gendered nature of nuclear violence and on women’s disempowerment in the process. Chapter Two presents the experience of the people of Rongelap Atoll as “human radiation experiments” (98) and focuses particularly on the effect of radiation (and treatment) on Rongelapese women’s voices and how this affects, amongst other things, Rongelapese musicality. Chapter Three focuses largely on the experiences of the people of Bikini Atoll and the staged nature of their removal. Here the physicality and gendered characteristics of performance/performing are explored: women’s voices, due to the effects of radiation but also the need to assert authority within the constructed masculine narrative, are “trapped in a gendered register” (142). The role of anthems in relation to identity also features here. Chapter Four explores the role of Christianity and the Church in the lives of the people, and in particular Bikinian men’s voices and broader performance practices as “part of their larger decolonial struggles” (174). Crucially, here the author acknowledges the complexity of identify formation and Bikinian’s “interwoven inheritance: the spirit of sharing alongside Rongelapese, Marshallese, Ijjidik, Oceanic, Christian, American, and so forth” (210). Chapter Five, the concluding chapter, extends this discussion of interwoven inheritance into song authorship, all the while recognising an “inability to hear the matrilineage” (220) in nuclear times. As with chapters that preceded it, the conclusion combines moving interlocutor accounts and close analyses of musical performances to illustrate the importance of song as voice for Marshallese people, and as remediation.

This is a very sophisticated and well-researched book, enriched by the sharing of personal experience and observations that illuminate the research relationships that form its foundation. Throughout the book we see Schwartz’s considerable power as an ethnographer as she evocatively describes the experiences that shape her knowledge and argument. There are a reasonable number of acronyms and indigenous terms which may have benefitted from a glossary, but these can be easily located in the text via the Index. Taking into account the very locally-situated discussions, a map identifying the Islands might have been helpful for those not familiar with them.

The focus on music in this book is initially on lyrics; very detailed descriptions of the musical elements of performances are also present. There are a handful of photographs that including music-making, performance, and musical instruments. One must always ask, when presented with a new book about music, wherein lies the sound. It is the perpetual challenge of print publication, and different authors find different ways to manage this by including companion CDs/DVDs, links to websites, QR codes, musical notations, and so on. Schwartz, in her evocative description of musical performances, does a very good job in conveying the essence of what we might hear, but one cannot help but reflect on the sound/silence dynamic around radiation so well extrapolated in this book, and apply it to the realm of academic scholarship in music. This is less of a criticism of this book but more of a comment on print publishing on music at large. A discography or list of external musical sources functioning as a “go-to” list might have been useful for those wishing to actually hear the sound of Marshallese music, but of course this is challenging for music that is unrecorded and/or unpublished through accessible channels, as is the case for many of the performances described in this book, which were performed in very local contexts.

This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars: historians, political scientists, anthropologists, Pacific studies, gender studies, and disaster studies scholars, in addition to ethnomusicologists and dance ethnologists. In teaching, it would be a good resource for graduate students. The book’s appeal is broad while its ethnographic content is geographically and culturally specific. Its publication is timely: with the growing threat of climate change and its immediate effect on low-lying nations of the Pacific, the world is finally beginning to take notice of this region of the world. The lives of Pacific Islanders continue to be under threat in multiple ways, and it is vital that these voices be heard beyond the Islands. This book does an excellent job in bringing these voices to the wider world.

As the quote that opens Chapter Two describes, the “songs are happy and sad” (83). Likewise, within this book is both an incredible weight of sadness, trauma, and suffering; but also, in voicing this suffering, it reveals the strength of a culture that is worth celebrating.