Hawaii Books

ALOHA Where You Like Go?: From Survival to Satisfaction by Honolulu Taxi

Anyone who loves Honolulu - or would like to - should read this sweet, funny little memoir of a "local girl" whose family represents the history of 20th century Hawaii (and modern Korea!). Accessible and valuable. Glenda's world travels as a young girl are a wonderful arm-chair journey. See her other book(s) as well!
Cloudia W. Charters, author of "Aloha Where You Like Go? From Survival to Satisfaction by Honolulu Taxi"

This translation includes valuable information in physical, psycho-emotional and spiritual issues that arise with illness. Often the more esoteric information is "lost in translation"

This award-winning book is a treasure for anyone who loves Hawaii, flowers, or great writing. The pictures are stunning - you can almost feel the texture of the plants and smell the flowers. The literary quotes show how Hawaii and its flora have inspired the great writers who have lived and visited here, and give us a new way to see the plants through their eyes. There is just the right amount of technical information about the plants. Most of all, this book transports you to Hawaii. The book received a Ka Po'okela Palapala Award from the Hawaii Book Publishers Association for design.

Winner 2007 Ka Palapala Po`okela Book Awards:
Children's Literature
Children's Hawaiian Culture

Synopsis:

Join Lono, a Hawaiian fisherman, as he dives below the ocean waves to search for his missing fishhooks. Deep below the sea, at the foundation of the Earth, Lono instead discovers an enchanted land filled with abundant food plants and gains the knowledge of growing these plants for the people of his island home.

This beautifully illustrated storybook, filled with Loebel-Fried's signature wood block prints and vibrant colors, is based on Mary Kawena Pukui's translation of "Mo`olelo Kahiko no Kumuhonua", from the Bishop Museum Archives. The original Hawaiian text is also included.

This storybook also provides ethnobotanical information on traditional Hawaiian food plants, as well as an after word on Lono and the Makahiki season for readers of all ages.


About the Author:

Caren Loebel-Fried is a storyteller and second-generation carver who learned the ancient art of block printing from her mother. Her award-winning illustrations have appeared in many books and magazines and her stories are regularly published in Parabola. She spends her time with her husband and son in Volcano, Hawaii, and in New Jersey.

There are a dizzying multitude of Buddhist scriptures, but in East Asia one of the most influential by far is the Lotus Sutra. This book contains an excellent array of fine scholarly articles exploring this influence in the case of Japan from before the Nara period to the present. And it does this from a wide variety of angles: artistic, poetic, political, geographical, doctrinal, liturgical, and so on. The Sutra's place in both Tendai and Nichiren is addressed in the process, though the discussions are not limited to the sectarian dimension. A great variety of people should find this book interesting and useful.

After an introduction by the editors, the articles are as follows:
1. "The Meaning of the Formation and Structure of the Lotus Sutra" by Shiori Ryodo
2. "The Ideas of the Lotus Sutra" by Tamura Yoshiro
3. "The Lotus Sutra and Saicho's Interpretation of the Realization of Buddhahood with This Very Body" by Paul Groner
4. "Pictorial Art of the Lotus Sutra in Japan" by Miya Tsugio (includes eight illustrations)
5. "Poetry and Meaning: Medieval Poets and the Lotus Sutra" by Yamada Shozen
6. "The Lotus Sutra and Politics in the Mid-Heian Period" by Neil McMullin
7. "Historical Consciousness and Honjaku Philosophy in the Medieval Period on Mount Hiei" by Kuroda Toshio
8. "The Textualized Mountain--Enmountained Text: The Lotus Sutra in Kunisaki" by Allan G. Grapard
9. "Tanaka Chigaku: The Lotus Sutra and the Body Politic" by George J. Tanabe, Jr.
10. "The Lotus Sutra in Modern Japan" by Helen Hardacre

First of Dr. Gerbert wrote an outstanding introduction to these two stories. She not only gives the reader detailed background information on the writer himself, but she also paints a wonderful picture of the time period in which the author wrote. She also gives detailed information on the various types of writing styles and writing groups that were popular at the time. I, myself, am mainly a reader of very modern Japanese fiction, but reading these stories warped me back to a different time. No i do not mean the time ofsword weilding samurai, but of a time when Japan's encounter with Matthew Perry was in the recent memory. Uno is an interesting man because his family unlike many of other authors' families was not very privledges. He started off that way but when his father died early his mother was forced to become a waitress, and because of her low income he was forced to live with other relatives, and because of this he met people he would have normally never saw such as fishmnongers and prostitutes. His early life made him different than the polished Nagai Kafu, and he became sort of an outsider, but after becoming sick, he became a more standard writer, and a very important one at that, becoming the head of the Akutagawa prize. The stories in this book are vastly different than the other. The first one is quite short and deals with a selfish 40 year old man who i obsessed with his old clothes that he stored in a storehouse. He even visits his old clothes. the second story deals with a writer who pines for the affection of a young geisha and the people he meets along the way. those are the stories in a nutshell. one must read them to really experience them

I reviewed Conrad's other book, "The Green Archipelago", and this book is of the same caliber. Easy to read, and very informative for the reason I purchased it. I was able to use the facts for my research paper and my English professor enjoyed reading it; I got the A+ I needed and I passed my course this semester with one of the highest grades in the class.

James Belich is probably now the definitive New Zealand historian, with a strong grasp of both Mäori and pakeha (New Zealand decendants of Europeans) perspectives. This account of New Zealand's history up to the mid-to late 19th century is both informative and interesting.

Not everyone will agree with all of his interpretations, but they are always challenging and well argued as well as being a genuinely good read.

Well, years and years of hard work, research, and fieldwork have gone into the making of this excellent study, and it certainly shows. "Making Pilgrimages" is scholarly in the best sense of the term; it is meticulous, careful, critically astute and finely nuanced, containing serious theoretical implications for our understandings of Japanese religiosity and the practice of pilgrimages in general while at the same time grounded in the particularities of this specific pilgrimage route and obviously inspired by a long-time fascination with it--all of this has been framed into a clear, appealing narrative full of big ideas, little insights and wonderfully understated flashes of humor. And here as usual Ian Reader never misses the forest for the trees nor the trees for the forest, but gets the balance just right.

The book has a sort of tripartite structure overall. The first three chapters discuss in general terms the specifics of the 88 Temple Pilgrimage route: What are its basic elements and common characteristics? Who does it and why? How does the geography of Shikoku (the natural AND human environment) shape the pilgrimage? What are the legends surrounding it, and what are the multiple understandings of its significance? Questions like these are explored first. The middle two chapters take a historical approach, tracing the Shikoku pilgrimage's development from its shadowy origins until the present day. Lots and lots of cool, fascinating details here.

Finally the last three chapters are the most personal in tone, as Ian Reader shares with us the fruit of his many years of fieldwork, first as a walking pilgrim on the route and second as a pilgrim on a chartered bus tour. One really gets a concrete feel for the dynamics of these two most common methods of performing the pilgrimage here (others include taxi, bike, and even helicopter (!)). In the last chapter he takes on aspects of this subject most anthropologists of religion ignore, like the aftereffects of the pilgrimage experience on those who have finished it as well as the phenomenon of those who never finish--who in one way or another remain seriously engaged with the pilgrimage on a lifelong basis.

A nice feature of this book too are the many photographs, which gives one a vivid image of what the pilgrimage looks like. There are lots of helpful glossaries, indexes, and appendices in the back too, including a very helpful list of the 88 Temples, the kanji (Chinese characters) for their names, the main image of worship, and the sect to which the temple belongs--interestingly enough, the pilgrimage is dedicated to the great monk Kukai/Kobo Daishi, the founder of the Shingon sect, but the temples themselves are not necessarily limited to this one sect.

In general, I can recommend this fine book both to the scholar and the general reader, and both to those whose interest is focused on Japan and to those who are more concerned with understanding the earthwide human practice of religious pilgrimage as a whole. And for sure anyone who's into Japanese religion and Buddhism should absolutely not do without it.

Along with the dictionary and the grammer by Pukui and Elbert, this is a required book for anyone who wants to understand and use modern hawaiian. The dictionary gives us an understanding of the ancient language, but this book allows us to express words like printer and carbohydrate in ke `olelo (the language).