“Peopled with Icelandic poet-farmers and one-handed Malagasy musicians, these joyful essays praise the unquenchable human spirit and suggest that isolation on islands may be positively beatific.”

"Elegant. . .. Holm shows how our imaginations are linked to geography in a dozen different ways. . .. Expansive and imaginatively written, Eccentric Islands is a joyfully unordinary book, its spirit irresistable.”

“An expertly wrought memoir of journeys to islands real, metaphorical, and imaginary. . .. One thing that is true, Holm insists (gainsaying John Donne), is that we are all, in fact, islands. . .. He celebrates the very real pleasures of spending time on little pockets of the world that are at a far remove from any other place. . .. Holm mixes keen you-are-there observations with profound bits of homespun philosophizing, and never once does he sound a false note. The result is a pleasure for islomanes, and for anyone who appreciates good writing.”

“Of all the landscapes in Eccentric Islands, the most multitudinous may be those of the interior—what Holm calls islands of imagination, of ideas. It is here that he evokes the true complexity of island thinking, from the joyous revelation of thought to the brutal isolation of despair. For Holm, both states are equally important, equally authentic; they are how we come to know ourselves as distinct from those around us, and, in so doing, forge a more articulated relationship with the world.”

“Having conjured a desert island beneath a cottonwood tree in the vast sea of his farmer father's fields as a boy, Holm knows that while islands are useful as microcosms, they can engender elusions, and he holds this yin-yang vision firmly in mind as he chronicles various island sojourns throughout the world. A true raconteur. . .. Vibrant, adventurous, and empathic.”