Reflections on Caribbean Jewish reading: while my kids and job have limited my time for pleasure reading, I was able to slowly complete Judah M. Cohen's "Through the Sands of Time" on the Jews of St. Thomas over the past couple of months. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know about our people in this part of the world. It is thoughtful, well-researched, and has excellent footnotes. It covers the full sweep of Jewish history on St. Thomas, from the Sephardic period, to the various attempts at Sephardic Reform, to the eclipse of Sephardic life by Ashkenazi Reform Jews. Cohen expresses a sincere respect for the synagogue's current community while not shying away from bursting some of their keenly cherished narrative bubbles. Though not above criticism, it sets a solid bar for what a good synthetic history should look like.Based on his discussion of Rev. Carillon's career, my thoughts turned to Jamaica for a possible next read. Opening Delevante and Alberga's "Island of One People" I became aware that it is basically a devoted attempt by laypeople to showcase their communal history, with all the pitfalls of that genre. After Cohen's book, it is turning out to be a disappointment (although admittedly it is full of lovely illustrations that would be difficult to find elsewhere). Does anyone know of a good monograph on this topic? Besides Delevante/Alberga I can think of only Andrade (haphazard, and a century old), Arbell (too short for deep analysis), Barnett (just the cemeteries), and Kritzler (pretty flawed, and Jamaica is only one of several topics that it covers). Is there really no quality, book-length synthetic history of Jewish Jamaica?