Hawaii Books

An absolute must for anyone who wants to do an indepth study of Buddhism in China. Clearly explains the different ways of thinking in the various Buddhist schools in China.

It is a shame we don't see more books of this quality from other authors.

THE CUSTOMS, CULTURES AND SUPERNATURAL INCIDENTS THAT HAPPENED IN THE PACIFIC ISLANDS.

I really liked this book. It was fun and taught me a lot about ilands getting formed. The pistures were so amzing and I felt like I was there. I want to visit Hawaii.
Jared Brownwell

The book has very clear & concise step by step instructions. The photographs are professionally formatted. With the proper equipment, supplies, and dedicated workmanship, your personally made ukulele will surpass in quality and value any ukulele you find in the market. I know because I have the book and am working on my third ukulele. The first I made for myself, the second for my daughter, and the third for my son. I now have family heirlooms to be proud of. I highly recommend this book. Ukulele-making is a fine art and to discover an ukulele-making book is a rare find. Hurry! Don't miss out. Grab one while you can. Denis Gilbert, my family thanks you very much for the opportunity to create treasures from the heart. Mahalo nui loa!

This guide to Maui has information on hotels, condos etc. with phone numbers for getting rates. History, maps, suggestions and tips and the most information in one book I've found. Necessity for planning and touring on your own.

This book is now available in an edition that costs only a third of the now out of print scholarly imprint. Although this work was written for Faulkner scholars, anyone interested in this great writer can profit from this readable text, which is devoid of academic jargon but also engages Faulkner most important critics.

This book really shocked me in a positive sense. It is en excellent and comprehensive review on the origin, geology and biogeography or the tropical Pacific islands and archipelagos. It covers zone by zone thoroughly and directly resulting in a great compilation of updated information, including orography, soils, area of the islands/archipelagos, geographic position, rock types, levels of disturbance or preservation, etcetera.

Being the vegetation the main topic, the book presents the general and particular trends of evolution, biogeography and composition of plant communities, as well as taxonomic affinities, changes with altitudinal gradients, dominant and most common species per community, influences of the regional weather patterns like typhoons, El Niño phenomenon, and others. It is a great and elegant explanation of why, when and how the varied islands of the tropical Pacific have gotten their vegetation! Please do not expect a simple list of species present in the area.

I really have minor blames, being one the lack of better, bigger and more specific photographs of the diferent islands, plant communities, and species. In the future, a file of great photographs should be added to increase the excellence of the book.

Finally, reading it has left me with a better understanding of the fantastic evolution of the old Panthalassia until becoming the modern Pacific ocean (with its complex basins and seamounts, volcanos, island chains, frightening sea bottoms and trenches) as a result of the impressive breaking and drifting of all components of Gondwanaland!

As a long-time resident of Honolulu (23 years) as I was growing up (we moved there in 1965), I developed a great love of Hawaiian history. This fine book, with its wealth of photographs of the early days of the late 19th century and early 20th, is a treasure. The written history is also very informative and well done. If you are interested in the development of Honolulu, the passing of the Hawaiian monarchy and Honolulu as it once was, this is a fantastic book. It made me sad for what Honolulu has become and wistful for days long past...

After almost a century of modern-style research, the world is not exactly short of ethnographies. You can find works on everybody from Indiana town dwellers to Sri Lankan fishermen. Papua New Guinea, as an area where a wide variety of cultures, some with Stone Age technologies, endured well into the 20th century, attracted the attention of anthropologists right from the start. There are a very large number of books on the country, starting with Malinowskiýs seminal works on the Trobriand Islands during and after WW I. Most, but not all, of them concentrated on investigations of what are often referred to as ýtraditional culturesý, if not ýprimitiveý. Anthropologists, not unlike Western tourists, have often been lured by the ýexoticý parts of the world where cultures extremely different from their own could be found. Bateson, Burridge, Glasse, Heider, Hogbin, Mead, Pospisil, Rappaport, Reay, Schieffelin, and Wagner to name a few, gravitated to Papua New Guinea, drawn perhaps by the chance to study people whose cultures were ýuntouchedý by the West. ýUntouchedý is no doubt a relative word. A few others, especially Lawrence and Worsley, delved into the cargo cults, an aspect of Melanesian religion that sprang up in the wake of colonial pressures on traditional beliefs. Modern Papua New Guinea, with its Christianity, bureaucracy, development projects, education, corruption, urban crime, and population explosion, has not received so much attention. Until now. Michael French Smithýs VILLAGE ON THE EDGE is a delightful new ethnography based on work in the same village in the mid-1970s and then in the late ý90s. Based on the idea of observing change, because Kragur village, on Kairiru island, off the north coast of the country, has been changing rapidly for many decades, Smith succeeds brilliantly. To my taste, he strikes just the right note between popular writing and professional investigation. In a clear, jargon-less style, he covers many areas usually found in ethnographies, such as village structure, family structure, the economic and political system, and religious beliefs, but focusses on how all these things have changed. It is a down-to-earth, non-exotic picture of present dilemmas for the Kragur villagers who still, after over twenty years of independence, remain poised between a sharing, cooperative society based on personal ties and the money-based, more individualistic one introduced as a correct model by the West and emulated by educated, town-dwelling locals. Smith puts himself into the picture, admits to his predilections and difficulties. Refreshingly, he does not hide behind some false ýobjectivityý, but shows how he accepted certain privileges (and dealt with some problems) that came with being a ýwhitemaný. This honesty, coupled with a sense of humor and nice introduction of the flavor of Pidgin English or Tok Pisin, a national language in the country, made the book all the more appealing.

Melanesian societies often believed that knowledgeý-of magic or ritualý-held the key to success in any endeavor, would be the best guarantee of prosperity. Those who had the best knowledge grew the best crops, caught the most fish, or had the most successful trading relationships. But, if many people in the village had that knowledge, then the whole village would be prosperous and successful. Thus, Kragur villagers, like most Melanesians, saw Western education as the way to go if they wanted to raise their standard of living, to obtain money and an easier life. Get Western education, prosper like the Westerners. In a way, Smith points out in the heart of the book, they have been proven right, but the results challenge the whole belief system that underlay their society. For them, if individuals prosper, but the village does not, the new knowledge has failed to produce the desired result. But as time goes by, as more individuals prosper, will not the old ideals completely fade, will not the old cooperative society vanish ? The village is on the edge.

I urge everyone interested in knowing what Papua New Guinea is like today to read this book. It should be on every reading list dealing with the modern Pacific, modern Melanesia, or ýdilemmas of developmentý. If you are trying to attract students to the field of anthropology or to draw their attention to the process of writing ethnographies, you can hardly go wrong with VILLAGE ON THE EDGE.

This book is a well-researched and finely written scholarly work that really jars our standard picture of Tokugawa Japan. You know, the samurai governed and so concerned themselves with Confucian philosophy and ethical issues while the disenfranchised merchants blew their money in the pleasure quarters after a hard day's work, presumably complacent in this arrangement--so the story goes, but Najita shows us many different merchant thinkers in Japan's early modern moneymaking hub, Osaka, dealing with the crucial sociopolitical, economic issues of the day guided by their own distinct take on Confucian ideas and ideals (which included developing a rationale for this kind of philosophising on their part in the first place). These thinkers include the founders of the Kaitokudo Academy in 1726, Miyake Sekian and Nakai Shuan; then later scholars and teachers like Tominaga Nakamoto, Goi Ranju, Nakai Chikuzan, Nakai Riken, Kusama Naokata, and Yamagata Banto. Their interaction with other scholars like Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai is also discussed, and we thereby get a fuller sense of their participation in the intellectual world of Tokugawa Japan and of what their particular contribution to that world was.
Anyone interested in Japan at all should read this book. I would especially recommend it to anyone interested in Japanese intellectual history or political economy. Also, if you want to know more about one of the finest and most underrated of cities, Osaka, you won't want to miss this.