Hawaii Books

Comprehensive, beautifully illustrated with botanical drawings. A stunning work of scholarship, it is the ultimate reference for Hawaiian flora. Two large volumes. Intended for professionals, but amateurs like myself who persist (and use the glossary at the end of volume two) find it fascinating. Be sure to get the 1999 edition rather than the one from a decade earlier.

The 1990 edition has been superceded by the 1999 edition. Be sure to get the current one.

This is an excellent map of the Big Island. It is the only map you will need. I wasted my time looking elsewhere, so hopefully you can save time.

This is the best map of the Big Island I've seen. It has a thorough index on the back and even shows housing subdivisions. It's perfect for those moving to the Big Island like us.

How nice to read another student's rerview. The author was a very fine teaccher, but by 1960 the class syayed at the Y with no field trips. We learned from an expert cook and my family enjoyed home-cooked Chinese food because of her fine technique. It IS a GOOD cookbook.

Mrs. Sia was my chinese cooking teacher at the Honolulu Y. in 1958. She was a wonderful teacher and we all adored and respected her. Interestingly, Mrs. James Michener( I think her name was Mariko) was studying with us. Our teacher would take us on field trips to noodle factories, grocery stores and a big restaurant Wo Fat's. I have used this book almost exclusively and want to purchase copies for my daughters and daughters-in-law.I highly recommend this book as easy to read and follow with delicious results.

Maui has always been my favorite Hawaiian island, so when I came across this book on a recent trip to Hawaii, I bought it immediately. The photographs are as gorgeous as the island itself. The text is interesting, too. A great coffee table book.

My wife and I wnet to Maui for out 10 year anniversary. We bought this in the Maui Costco and it takes me back to the Island everytime I look through it. This is a wonderful book. The images are fantastic and very colorful. Looking through the book, I found several photos that resembled mine. It makes a wonderful coffee table book and spurs several converations about what we enjoyed about Maui. This is a must buy for those who have been to the Island.

This book has all the information you will need to find and buy the perfect condominium in Maui. It covers all areas of the island and has maps and floorplans for all the listings and recent sale prices. Amenities for each condo such as pool, parking, etc. are also listed.

I just purchased this book and it is superb. It has so much information and so far it has all been correct. This will save me a lot of time and money. I am very impressed with this publication.

This is a lovely story for kids and adults. Join the four menehune named Aka, Peke, Elema and Puluke as they run into a nene (goose) egg and decide that this would be a great meal. Our four friends, however, are out of luck when the egg hatches and a baby nene emerges and adopts Ake as its mother. What are four little menehune to do? I was very fortunate to have stumbled upon this delightful folktale and to see the menehune struggle with situations that are beyond their control. The illustrations are very colorful and truly lovely. This is a great read and would be a wonderful gift to any young (or older) reader.

When I was a little girl, my grandparents went to Hawaii. When they returned, they brought me this book as a present, and it soon became my favorite. I would ask for it each night we went to visit my grandparents. As I grew older, I almost forgot about the little men of Hawaii and their goose. Years later, my grandparents' house had to be sold, and this book was one of the few things I took with me to my house. Perhaps someday I will read it to my children....

This is an excellent book for the little ones. Great intro to the world of surfing.

Moki and The Magic Surfboard is a delightful tale of a gecko who wants to surf the biggest wave in the world. With the help of a magical surfboard he gets his wish and then some! His biggest lesson though is not in the power of the magical surfboard, but in the power of being a true friend.

This book is filled with colorful illustrations that are bound to make any child's imagination soar. This book is a must for all families with a love of the water and surfing!

This is a high quality guidebook from respected company Moon Handbooks. I love the smaller format, medium-small type, and thin pages, so when you tote this along, it is very lightweight. It's also very durable for a paperback--it's meant to be carried around in your backpack during your journeys.

This covers just the island of Oahu, which is home to Waikiki and Honolulu. It's broken up into chapters on the land, the ecology, the history, arts & music, sporting & recreation, and so on. All of this makes great plane ride reading. The bulk of the book is a geographically-divided tour around the island, listing beaches, attractions, accomodations, food & drink, etc. I used this to get around Waikiki and found all the info to be up to date and very useful.

This book contains a lot of information about the island and its many beaches.

I bought this book from AAA before my first visit to Hawaii. What really surprised me about this book was how the first few chapters were about the Land, Flora&Fauna, History, Government & Economy, and People of the island. From these pages I learned more about the island and its people than your average Hawaiian sun-worshipping tourist.

The book also offers lots of ideas and information for Sports & Entertainment, Shopping, Food and Drinks. Each different area of the island is detailed with a map and minute details about the beaches.

The book lacks the colorful touristy postcard pictures but makes up for it through the sheer amount of information (and good organization) for everyone, be they young or old, jocks or bums, artists or history-buffs, food-connoisseurs or Hawaiian-drink enthusiasts.

Overall a great buy, and will use it on all future trips to O'ahu.

NOTE: This book covers O'ahu island exclusively (and not any of the other 6 Hawaiian islands). There is information on how to reach the other islands though, but nothing beyond that.

Na Mea Makamae is a book about Hawaiian artifacts. Author David Young writes "Artifacts are representations of a culture, and studying Hawaiian artifacts can lead to an interest in the ancient Hawaiian culture" (p. viii). But he also notes "Because of the passage of time, an anthropologist often can only speculate on the answers to... questions" (p. viii). As an example, he notes the inability to know the translation of tapa and tattoo designs, and petroglyph drawings. I recognized this when I asked USFWS managers about petroglyphs of whales (or the apparent lack thereof); their guess was as good as mine.

This book combines exceptionally well-reproduced photographs, drawings, and illustrations, as well as modern photographs of artifacts in collections and museums, with interpretations and text from the limited sources of Hawaiians like David Malo who attempted to record their disappearing culture, even through the biased lens of a missionary education.

Interspersed throughout are reproductions of photographs on a translucent "vellum"; very attractive.

Young notes "The years 1820-1870 were most devastating to the Hawaiian people. Their social oder and religious system had been overthrown, their population was in decline as a result of disease, their forests and farms had been stripped and neglected, and family unity was threatened as a result of the emergence of towns catering to the commercial interests of the foreigners. Their faith in their culture suffered as they were made by the newcomers to feel ashamed of their religion, language, and lifestyle, and in many homes the Hawaiian language was forbidden and reference to Hawaiian ways punished" (p. 7).

Young presents artifacts relating to:

- food
- shelter
- the use of trees
- textiles
- clothing
- canoes and trails
- fishing
- games and recreation
- musical instruments
- war and weapons
- religion
- ornaments

Since I'm particularly interested in honu, Young reports that James King, on one of Cook's voyages, noted "At Atooi [Kauai], some of the women wore little figures of the turtle, neatly formed of wood or ivory, tied to their fingers in the manner we wear rings" (p. 91).

Young, in an afterward, writes "This suppression of traditional culture, which began in the early 1800s, resulted in the loss not only of traditional Hawaiian religion, language, and lifestyle, but also of the art forms represented by Hawaiian artifacts" (p. 97). The existing artifacts, and the minimal descriptions that exist in Hawaiians' own words and in the journals of early explorers and missionaries, is all that exists. When Young uses the word "loss", he means exactly that... it is gone. Our recreations, and interpretations, are our attempts to describe a past that is unrecorded, and lost.

A terrific book for people interested in Hawaiiana.

David Young was born and raised in Hawai`i by a kama`aina family with a keen appreciation for both the Hawaiian culture and Hawaii's natural environment. It is obvious from both his introduction and from the book itself that Na Mea Makamae is a work of love and respect. Most of the material in Young's book has been taken from other published material. As a result, Hawaiian Treasures is primarily a compilation of knowledge from other sources. However, Young openly acknowledges that and he provides very complete notes about his sources for each chapter and an excellent bibliography.

One could easily dismiss Young's book as just another "me too" collection of things Hawaiian - but that would be a BIG mistake.

Books about collections of artifacts can be terribly boring and bear a close resemblance to reading a catalog, but Young's beautiful book is about as far away from that category as you can get. He has assembled a varied and amazingly representative collection of Hawaiian artifacts, took high quality photographs of them and then added rich commentary to weave a totally captivating book. As he explains in the introduction, "artifacts are representations of a culture." Young has chosen a cross-section of Hawaiian artifacts that clearly portrays both the richness of artistic achievement and the simultaneous practicality with which Hawaiians dealt with their environment. Many of the artifacts that he has chosen are from the Kailua-Kona area, which makes this book especially interesting to Big Island residents or visitors.

One of the unique features of Hawaiian Treasures that elevates it to "coffee table" status (in addition to the photographs) is that many of the chapters are preceded by semi-transparent vellum pages which are printed with an historical photograph or drawing, or a Hawaiian kapa or fish-netting pattern. The effect is stunning. In the case of the natural materials, you can almost feel the textures! Chapters include such subjects as: early collectors, food, shelter, trees, textiles, clothing, travel, fishing, recreation, musical instruments, weapons, religion, ornaments, etc.

Young uses a very nice combination of photographs (many historical), dictionary-like text entries and interview material to present a surprisingly complete, if brief, overview of the Hawaiian culture. In only 109 pages, he does an excellent job of portraying the complexity, richness and beauty of early Hawaiian life. I've read a lot about Hawai`i, but I learned a lot of new things here (and read about some locations that I have to snoop around now). There is some especially interesting material on the uses of lava caves that I haven't seen before. The only significant way that I think the book might be improved would be to lengthen the descriptions and discussions about some of the artifacts. But then, I suspect that one of Young's purposes in creating this book was to whet people's appetites for more information about the Hawaiians' amazing culture. Hawaiian Treasurers is beautiful, quite remarkable and definitely belongs in everyone's Hawaiian library.

Myrna Ericksen's Nalani Of Hawaii is an evocative, engaging novel of Nalani, an Hawaiian woman who has deferred marriage to further her career - yet when she opens her heart to love at last, an unexpected tragedy leaves her faced with stark choices for her new life. Written very much in tune with the natural rhythms and beauty of Hawaii itself, Nalani Of Hawaii is a compelling and highly entertaining novel focusing on the quandary of a woman striving to find balance in the present and the future.

I want to go to Hawaii and find Nalani. I just loved her. Her people come first in her life, and her virtues are not traits readily found in today's world. Very refreshing and informative to read, and I couldn't put it down till I found out who got Nalani in marriage, for I thought they were great men. The Author, Myrna Ericksen, certainly knows how to pick her subjects, which are also portrayed in her other books: "Onward Peregrinos", and "Silent No More". I look forward to Myrna's next book. I know she won't disappoint me. Louise McGowan