Hawaii Books

Everything you need to know about making Hawaiian musical intstruments.
Easy to follow pictures and informative text.

This book has made it possible for us to save hundreds of dollars because we can now make our own instruments for our dance classes and recitals. I believe that this is a MUST-HAVE for schools that do not have immediate access to ready made instruments or those that do not have the money to purchase ready made instruments. A great resource book!

This wonderful book gives a complete historical perspective of the Hawaiian dance form known as the hula. The Hawaiians had no writing - their history was entirely oral. So for the history of the Hula prior to the arrival of Europeans in Hawai`i, we are entirely reliant on descriptions of the first European visitors to Hawai`i and on some early accounts written by Hawaiians who learned to write. Source material is scarce. When the missionaries arrived, they were, of course, shocked by the lascivious hula movements, and quickly made it illegal (in public). Fortunately for the hula and for all of us, King Kalakaua (1874-1891) loved the hula and was responsible for a revival that continues today. The annual hula festival on the Big Island - THE MERRY MONARCH FESTIVAL - honors his devotion to this art form. This book covers all of that, plus lots of information on the Hula Heiau (temple) on Kaua`i that is still heavily used today. You have to have this book if you are interested in hula at all.

This book obviously has humble orgins. Much of it is in a typeface resembling typewritten pages, and it is a compilation of papers written by various authors. However its historical perspective on the initial explorers description of hula, the rites of the halau hula (hula school) and in particular the historical activities of hula on the island of Kaua`i is invaluable to the student of Hawaiian culture and hula. I read it and immediately started buying the other books referenced in it.

A great book for kids. The littlest opihi stuck to it through thick and thin just like opihi always do. A nice lesson from nature.

You should read this book because it has good description, it has great pictures and a outstanding setting. My favorite character is the crab because he had little coral plants with smiles on his back. The crab and coral were very nice. My favorite part was when Opihi was on the crabs back while crab brought him home to the sea rocks. It was my favorite part because it was funny. It was cute and playful to.
by Jillian P

This is a definitive and well written book on Balinese paintings from the village of Batuan. This book serves as the exhibition catalog for the Batuan Painting exhibition from the collection of Bateson and Mead. Prof. Geertz illusively decribed the relationship between the Balinese culture, tradition and myth, the western influence and the development of Balinese Paintings. Highly recommended for the patrons and the students of Balinese Painting

I am Balinese and enjoyed this book. It is a catalogue of Margaret Mead's and her husband Gregory Bateson's collection of paintings. They were in Bali off and on throughout the Thirties.

Batuan is a village in Central Bali, which is not far from my own village of Ubud. They are both artists' villages, but the painting styles are very different. Ubud has attracted a lot of foreigners, who have influenced the local artists. This was not the case with the painters in Batuan, who developed their own style.

Professor Hildred Geertz is a renowned anthropologist, who writes well, and explains the stories behind these paintings, which would otherwise be rather hard to follow. I think that some of the points she mentions are original and interesting.

Most of the painters are profiled with a short biography. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bates interviewed the painters and made notes. Some are charming and very personal, like the fact that Ida Bagus Made had been to a movie once.

Recommended.

Often overlooked in favor of the more explicitly political of his contemporaries (most notably, Lu Xun), Shen Congwen's work is richly textured, complex, and lyrical. Shen is a writer who brings the China of his past and present alive without the overburdening and unreal pressure of trying to save it. Nostalgia breathes through his pastoral countryside scenes, and his urban landscapes reveal a fractured, paradoxical consciousness--both unsure and hopeful. In many ways Shen plays the anthropologist to Lu Xun's politically ultra-conscious social engineer. And in this sense he seems more real to a modern reader. He approaches his subjects with less judgment, and with much less baggage. While others try to give life to Chinese society through social change and self-criticism, Shen is more invested in the life that is already there. Certainly he expresses his opinions about many aspects of Chinese culture throughout his stories, but he avoids the beat-you-over-the-head approach. In many cases, it's difficult to really assess what he thinks, which makes exploring his work a more challenging, and satisfying, adventure.

The translations in this edition are smoothly rendered and very readable, although the edition suffers, I think, from its diverse group of contributors. Without a single translator it is difficult to achieve a continuity of style and substance. But all in all this collection is a tremendous addition to the English-accessible literature of modern China. Shen is brilliant and poetic, but in a subtle, understated way. The entire collection is infused with a cocktail of profound nostalgia for the past, hope for the future, and, most of all, the beauty and innocence of the living present.

Often overlooked in favor of the more explicitly political of his contemporaries (most notably, Lu Xun), Shen Congwen's work is richly textured, complex, and lyrical. Shen is a writer who brings the China of his past and present alive without the overburdening and unreal pressure of trying to save it. Nostalgia breathes through his pastoral countryside scenes, and his urban landscapes reveal a fractured, paradoxical consciousness--both unsure and hopeful. In many ways Shen plays the anthropologist to Lu Xun's politically ultra-conscious social engineer. And in this sense he seems more real to a modern reader. He approaches his subjects without judgment, and with much less baggage. While others try to give life to Chinese society through social change and self-criticism, Shen simply and beautifully reveals the life that is already there.

The translations in this edition are smoothly rendered and very readable, although the edition suffers, I think, from its diverse group of contributors. Without the unifying vision of a single translator it is difficult to achieve a continuity of style and substance. But all in all this collection is a tremendous addition to the English-accessible literature of modern China. Shen is brilliant and poetic, but in a subtle, understated way. The entire collection is infused with a cocktail of profound nostalgia for the past, hope for the future, and, most of all, the beauty and innocence of the living present.

"In Light of Shadows" collects three more Gothic tales from Japanese master Izumi Kyoka. He is not an easy writer to get into, as is style is deep and complex, and filled with allusion to classic Japanese literature that you probably haven't read. However, the skillful translation of Charles Inouye has provided a bridge into Kyoka's world, allowing Westerners to experience the sad beauty of his stories for the first time.

Kyoka's work is of extraordinary depth, and are the kind of tales that muddle around in your head long after you have turned the final page, trying to figure out if you actually understood them. Then, you are drawn back for a second, and a third reading, with each time a little more of the mystery being made clear.

"A Song by Lantern Light" weaves together two storylines, both of which are influenced by two separate Japanese classics, the travelogue "Shank's Mare" are the Noh play "The Diver." Two gentlemen, Yajirobei and Nejibei travel the same route as "Shank's Mare," constantly dropping quotes from the famous novel and trying their best to re-create the circumstances of the trip. Intermixed with this is the melancholy tale of a nameless, wandering singer and a beautiful woman, Omie. A haunting tale of redemption.

"A Quiet Obsession" is Kyoka's attempt at an old-fashioned Japanese ghost story. A traveler visits an ancient inn, where the bath is haunted by the ghost of a beautiful woman. Slowly, her sad story unfolds in an unexpected way.

"The Heartvine" is a story with its own story. Kyoka was dying of lung cancer, and he knew full well that this would be his final tale. A young man considers suicide, but is saved by the intervention of a young woman who killed herself that same night. It is a story of life and death, the kind only a dying man could write.

At the end of the book, there are also individual essays of the three stories, putting them into historical and cultural perspective. Inouye's passion for Kyoka's writing is infectious, and it is wonderful the way he lays bare the secrets of the stories. I can only hope that this is just the next volume in a continuing series of Kyoka stories translated by Inouye.

This collection of stories by Izumi Kyoka is every bit as excellent as "Japanese Gothic Tales"--possibly better. The haunting moods that Izumi crafts are unlike most anything else I've come across in literature, resembling Poe but more subdued, less horrific. Less dramatic yet more moving. Unlike so many Japanese writers of the early 20th century, Izumi does not throw out the fine literary tradition of Japan in favor of the latest ill-digested trends from Europe, but draws on the best of both traditions to create something altogether more than the sum of its parts. This is probably why he's misunderstood by both his detratctors and his supporters as "quintessentially Japanese" or whatnot. Nope, he's just quintessentially himself, like all the authors we keep reading and re-reading generation after generation,

All three of the fine stories here are distinct in a number of ways too, giving the reader some sense of the scope of Izumi's talent. "A Song by Lantern Light" is one of the more structurally complex of his works, a moving tale of salvation and reconciliation. "A Quiet Obsession" is the closest thing here to a good old ghost story, but the convoluted layers of narration and the sort of time warp effect of the story make for a real mental bender. And "The Heartvine" is easily the most intense; the guy knew he was dying as he wrote it, and you can really feel that he put his whole heart and soul into this partially autobiographical final testament to his readers.

The virtuousi translation work by Charles Inouye should truly be commended, and his essays afterwards are thought-provoking and insightful; he should be thanked too for putting these at the end so that there are no spoilers.

If culture, as I tend to see it, is simply a way of doing and thinking, with Kasulis we have two orientations as cultures, namely, `intimacy' and `integrity' that have characterised over time, respectively, the west and east. The issue here is not to establish which of the two cultures is more important or better, let alone account for a state of conflict in the political sense (as an explanation that stems from adopting the "culture paradigm" of international relations, notably after Huntington).

Kasulis is more concerned with sharing with us the result of his observations. Namely, the existence of two fundamental and often antagonistic ways of doing and thinking in terms of how they (help) construct knowledge, analyse and explain events and experience. Simply put, as modes of describing experience.

Although such an approach resembles previous attempts to theorise and model cultures (by Geertz, Douglas, Lévi-Straus or Malinowski to name but the few that come to my mind), what is original and compelling with Kasulis is the explicitness of the argument and exposition. This is to the point of being extremely convincing that these orientations go beyond the typical cultural or civilisational divides: they are ways of organising action and patterns of thought regardless of our cultural context.

After an insightful introduction that maps antagonism as a source for (conflictual) misunderstandings, Kasulis attempts to approach culture as a habitual and recursive way of doing and thinking in broad terms (that does not exclude exceptions). If culture is any (broad) way of doing and thinking "cultural difference" with Kasulis results from a differential emphasis on one way of doing and thinking (rather than another), and hence a philosophical tradition comes into being in a `symbiotic relation to its culture's values' (p. 20). How this takes place is not clear though - note that with Deleuze it arises from habit itself.

Thus, `cultural difference' helps distinguish between `intimacy' and `integrity'. In simple terms, the former, explained in chapter 2, considers the world to be composed of interrelated units connected to each other through relations that are found inside such units. In contrast, the latter, explained in chapter 3, considers the world to be composed of independent units connected to each other through relations that are found outside such units.

Having developed these notions, Kasulis pursues with laying out the differences in terms of the manner each orientation delimits the construction of knowledge-production systems, rational argumentation as a tool of persuasion and investigation, and the way to construct reality itself - chapter 4. Furthermore, the difference in terms of aesthetic creation and interpretation, ethics relative to how the other is treated, and finally, the political construction of society as a collectivity - chapter 5.

In the final chapter, which in my view is the most important, Kasulis makes the general claim that either orientation, overall, is bound to predominate. He thus uses the notion of `dominance' to explain the consequences of foregrounding either orientation, and warns us against attempts to impose an orientation where its opposite (historically) prevails. This is because `such struggles for authority and for control of discourse' (p. 151) are conflictual (and not simply antagonistic). Thus, if we are to privilege trust and co-operation among different cultures, the solution seems to lie in `tolerance'.

Yet, if tolerance (for differing orientations) is the starting point, how do we go about deciding that this is to be the case? Which orientation are we to use? A first solution to this difficulty is to consider that we are capable of using both orientations. However, Kasulis notes, we cannot know which situation or event calls for which orientation. A second solution lies in changing from orientation to another. This is not a better solution, since such an `oscillation' tends to privilege one orientation rather than the other - `intimacy' over `integrity'. The solution for Kasulis seems to be an `oscillation' between the two orientations with a dimension of `reflectivity'. That is, being aware and using the two orientations as languages in that when one speaks the `intimacy' language, one cannot at the same time be speaking the `integrity' language.

And here lies the strength of this text: as languages, `intimacy' and `integrity' are two different modes for describing the same experience. They are two different forms to capture the same concern. This, in itself, is certainly not new. What is original is the realisation that Kasulis is right: that we tend to actually describe experience by means of two general languages, regardless of how these are called!

Overall, it seems to me that the approach to model culture and to explain differential and even conflictual behaviours through culture are not novel. Despite this, this text is an extremely valuable, brief and easy-to-read exposition of two useful descriptive means for a better understanding of the relationship between description and experience from within a philosophy of difference.

Thomas Kasulis is an exceptionally articulate scholar who has discovered the right balance between meaningful analysis and pragmatic implication. This text is relevant to any persons interested in comparative studies and the necessity of embracing both cultural difference, and those factors which unify us. In an increasingly globalized world, "Intimacy or Integrity" should be read by all of us who seek to better understand how to approach and appreciate one another, no matter who or where we are.

We ordered this book for our grandson to give as a gift on our return trip from Hawaii. We had vacationed on two of the islands for 2 weeks.
The book was such a delight. It was fun for us to review the things that we saw and be able to share it with our boys through the book. The book was very factual, colorful and our grandsons loved it.

What a great book! This one, written by U'Ilani Goldsberry and illustrated by Tammy Yee, is a nice addition to the Discover America State By State series. The alphabet is focused on Hawaiiana, of course. There are details of the alphabetized words ("A is for aloha") that make it appropriate for all ages, and I found them quite interesting.

There were a few things that irritated me. "Leis" is a weird word, since there is no "s" in the Hawaiian alphabet to mix with the Hawaiian word "lei". And "Zoning" for "z"... what's this about? Nevertheless, Goldsberry's text, and of course Tammy Yee's exquisite watercolors, make this a wonderful gift for that special person who is a kid at heart.

Island Grinds is a traveler's guide to the best local dining at the most economical prices on the Hawaiian islands of O'ahu, Hawai'i (a.k.a. "The Big Island"), Kaua'i, and Maui. Arranged by geographical location of the restaurants they describe, each one-page entry includes address information, hours when open, whether a restaurant is "BYOB" or accepts credit cards, average cost of a meal per person, and an in-depth description of each location's specialties, quirks, and charms. A "bottom line" sums up each eatery in a single sentence. Island Grinds is a "must-have" especially for vacationers seeking to sample the finest points of local Hawaiian cuisine. A highly recommended traveling supplement!

I picked this book up in Waikiki and was able to try 3 of the places listed while there. One of them twice. All three were delicious. This book contains more than just raves so you'll know what to expect in each restaurant. (There's also an index of local dish names to help when reading the reviews.) Although I was on O'ahu I read one review for a Maui restaurant that rated the food as average but noted the location made up for everything. Goldman's reviews contain critical advice on whether one, a few, or all dishes are especially good. There is even advice on how some dishes should be ordered.
My only regret? I lost my copy (including take out menus I had picked up) between the hotel, rental car and airport so I'll need to buy another before I return to The Islands.

This is a well-researched historical novel with a mystery and a romance. A must read for anyone who enjoys a well-crafted story.

In the 1850s the Hawaiian Islands were the focus of many people's dreams. Missionaries dreamed of bring God--and "civilization"--to the savage, heathen Hawaiians. Whalers, businessmen, and politicians dreamed of wealth and power--provided they could wrest control of the government completely away from King Kamehameha. And the islanders themselves dreamed of peace and independence. The Island Snatchers tells the story of Anne Cartwright, the widow of a missionary who has become a nurse to the islanders, and of Dr. Matthew Cabe, a man who comes to the islands to find answers about his father's downfall. They are brought together through a murder and a search for answers. Romantic Times said Janice Johnson "knows how to combine romance and suspense into good reading," and they are absolutely right. The Island Snatchers is a gripping novel that you will want to read again and again.