Even assuming an element of truth in such an assumption, it can hardly detract from the value and importance of the published work to be ceremonially launched on September 3 at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies.

`A Jamaican Voice in Caribbean and World Politics: P.J. Patterson -- Selected Speeches 1991-2000' edited by lawyer Delano Franklyn, Chief Advisor to the Jamaica Prime Minister, will soon find a place on the bookshelf of more than Jamaicans with a keen interest in Caribbean developments and the region's place in the rapidly changing international environment.

A collection of some 72 speeches and 15 pages of very useful index, spanning nine years from Patterson's rise to the office of Prime Minister in 1992 to the close of the 20th century, the reader is told by Sir Shridath Ramphal, former Commonwealth Secretary General and Chairman of The West Indian Commission in the Foreword to the book:

"The written words convey the intellectual rigour and political conviction that mark them out as notable. What the reader will miss, however, is the quiet authority with which they were delivered, and the respectful attention (if not always agreement) with which they were received..."

"The clarity of diction", added Ramphal, former head of the CARICOM Regional Negotiating Machinery, "the compelling deliberation, the unfailing civility that his speeches exuded, enhanced the text and made many of them, for those privileged to be present, special memories of a political craftsman at the height of his powers..."

For Caribbean icons like Ramphal, Chancellor of the UWI, and Vice Chancellor Rex Nettleford, encomiums for Patterson's leadership to Jamaica and on behalf of this region at international fora, flow with an admiration that could perhaps make the Jamaican Prime Minister blush.

Three years after succeeding the charismatic Michael Manley as the sixth Prime Minister of Jamaica since independence 40 years ago, Nettleford was sharing his own insights of Patterson in a Foreword to Arnold Bertram's earlier "Concise introduction" to the life and times of "P.J. Patterson: A Mission to Perform".

Author of that old but enduring reference source, "Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica", Nettleford recalled in that 1995 publication of Bertram, then Patterson's Special Advisor, that the leader of the governing People's National Party had come:

"From the mass of the population which Norman Manley once described as 'the real people in the land'. Those were the people who were key players in the making of a Jamaica which, for some three centuries and more, was 'built by labour'..."

Such a background, in Nettleford's view, "shared by all of Mr. Patterson's generation brought up in the hills and valleys of rural Jamaica, instilled in many such persons the values of hard work".

(Also) "sustained application, daring caution, optimism, a quiet belief in self, inordinate patience, a sense of ancestral rootedness in the shaping of a Jamaica emerging out of slavery and colonial rule and an enduring sense of process..."

Now, seven years later, the editor of "A Jamaican Voice in Caribbean and World Politics" and author of "The Right Move -- Corporate Leadership and Governance in Jamaica (2001)", introduces readers to a body of contributions to Caribbean thought and action, with Patterson's involvement at the international level for almost three decades.

It was an involvement with an exposure to Jamaica's and the Caribbean's relations with the world community that dates back to 1972 when Patterson was appointed Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism.

Ramphal, who said it was a "privilege" to have been invited by Franklyn to write the Foreword, admitted to knowing Patterson "for all of his political life and worked with him closely in many different capabilities throughout that time".

He did not say it, but those "capabilities" would have embraced the contributions of the Caribbean in the inauguration over a quarter of a century ago of what we know as the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of nations linked in trade and economic relations with Europe.

Now 68 and rearing to lead his PNP into what he hopes to be an unprecedented fourth consecutive electoral triumph -- something that the mercurial Edward Seaga, leader of the Jamaica Labour Party scoffs at -- Patterson is the longest and perhaps best known of CARICOM ministers in the international arena.

Franklyn has done a good job in his very lengthy introduction in which he has placed the speeches in an orderly context of national, regional and international changes and demands.

It is virtually in the mould of what Sir Ronald Sanders, the former journalist and now career diplomat has done in his editing of the recently released "Antigua Vision -- Caribbean Reality --Perspectives of Prime Minister Lester Bird", a Hansib Publication.

But the focus here is on Patterson who, as Franklyn reminds the reader, has earned the reputation as having the longest unbroken service of all of Jamaica's political leaders since the introduction of adult suffrage in 1944.

Franklyn has also taken the liberty to point out that among current heads of government of CARICOM, "none have given a longer unbroken service as Prime Minister than P.J. Patterson, and arguably, none of them have more experience than Patterson in the area of regional and international affairs".

Knowing something of how highly esteemed he is among his fellow CARICOM heads, I doubt that any of them will consider disagreeing even privately with the editor.