Hawaii Books

Having lived in Hawai'i for 11 years, I am deeply impressed by the books content, which is complete, accurate, and includes a very perceptive view of Hawai'i for the reader. In this un presumptious book there exsists a quality which few other books on the subject can match.

I purchased this book because I was fascinated by the design and color of tivaevae. But what makes this book endearing is the personal stories of the people who practice this art and are trying to keep this important aspect of Pacific Island culture alive.

If you are travelling to the Cook Islands and want to experience something off the well worn Lonely Planet path, ask a local to see her tivaevae. The people in the Cook Islands are the nicest I've met and if they have tivaevae in their homes, they probably will have no qualms about sharing the story of these amazing quilts with you. You can also travel to the Cook Islands and learn to make these quilts. They also have festivals sometimes displaying the more remarkable tivaevae. Even if you aren't into quilting, this book is excellent for learning about a unique aspect of island culture.

If you are looking for fiction about the islands, look at Frangipani: A Novel.

These letters written by a common sailor during a sea voyage more than a century ago have greater general interest today than might at first appear. The Challenger Expedition was once famous, followed by the public with more sustained interest than would be likely today for a scientific quest that lasted nearly four years, 1872-76.
Editor Philip Rehbock, a historian at the University of Hawaii, suggests that little of scientific interest is to be expected, inasmuch as HMS Challenger's work was reported in some 50 volumes. This turns out to be not quite accurate.
But the greatest interest is indeed personal and not scientific. The letter-writer, Joseph Matkin, was an intelligent teenager when the voyage began, and even though so young had already made voyages to Australia. He wrote the letters into a book of nearly 700 pages. This survived; few of the original letters did.
One blanches to think of reading 700 pages of letters written today by a teen who left school at 12, if indeed such a production is even conceivable. But Matkin writes beautifully and thoughtfully. More than once he thanks his father for the superior education he and his brothers received.
These letters are still readable because Matkin was genuinely curious about all the people he encountered. Not much is told about individual shipmates, except when they died by accident, disease or suicide, as they frequently did. Nor was he, as an assistant clerk, allowed much freedom to explore ashore.
So we see here his impressions of groups, not of individuals. Yet his assessments were not superficial. He read up on each place he visited, but was independent enough to disagree with his social betters about things.
Usually, he found exotic people rather more capable than his books had led him to expect, though not always. Rehbock is surprised that he is so tolerant, but perhaps he was no more so than average.
Rehbock's light annotation is adequate, but irritating because he apologizes beforehand for Matkin's 'ethnocentricity' every time he finds the locals not up to snuff. This becomes ridiculous when Rehbock puts figurative quotation marks around the word primitive. Some of the peoples encountered by the Challenger had not even attained agriculture. If that isn't primitive, what is?
On subjects less touchy to the politically correct, Rehbock lets Matkin speak without glossing him, and Matkin occasionally delivers a delightful or trenchant line. Sloths looked to him 'like a bundle of old hay,' and at Epi, New Hebrides, 'there are no missionaries for they ate one at Erromango a short time since.'
In Hawaii, he found the kanakas 'undoubtedlyh the most civilized of the Pacific races, but, unfortunately, it is this civilizing process that is killing them so fast.' When he got to Tahiti, he liked the Tahitians even better.
His Honolulu letter contains the fresh scientific information that makes this volume so valuable.
If you look carefully at any presentation on global warming, you will eventually find the Challenger Expedition. It was the first attempt to record seawater temperatures across the globe (not just in one ocean; that had been done before) and for several vast areas its records are the only source of information about conditions in the 19th century.
All claims that the globe is warming are based, more or less, on comparisons with Challenger's reports. It is thus of more than passing interest to find Matkin complaining that July 27, 1875, was a warm day in Honolulu harbor -- 120 degrees!
The globe, or this part of it, seems to have cooled a great deal since then.

MY 9 YR OLD LOVES ANYTHING TO DO WITH WAR. I SURPRISED HIM WITH THIS BOOK AND HE LOVES IT.

It's about a war beetween America and the Japanese. The war is very dangerous. This story is very interesting.It tells you alot about the Pearl Harbor. I like this book because it is very exciting. It's so exciting you won't want to stop reading it. It makes you feel like your in the story. So that's why I choose this book.

The book is a graphic book about Pearl Harbor. I am using this book to assist my ESOL students in learning American History. It is very hard to understand the history in English when you are learning it and do not know the norms and the culture. These books help students learn English as well as history. The clothes, the look of the setting and the historical period is very important for the students to see and to learn. I highly recommend these books.

Larry Kimmett and Margaret Regis book "The Attack on Pearl Harbor" is an excellent source of information and photos about the Japanese attack on the United States Pacific Fleet on Dec 7, 1941. This book is full of specific details about almost all of the people, equipment, and major leaders who were involved in this battle. It is easy to follow and is well written. While not a lengthy read (about 120 pages), it is packed full of relevant and specific stories from topics a varied as the Japanese special attack force, through the destruction of the Battleship Row, to the present day memorials to the USS Arizona and USS Utah. It is easy to recommend this book to anyone interested in what was one of the darkest days in American history.

The Documentary History series recreates its subjects primarily through eyewitness accounts, using selections from a wide range of sources contemporary to the event to portray "history as it actually happened." This is overstating the case to some extent, but the series does have the definite virtue of introducing students to doing research from primary sources. In "Attack on Pearl Harbor," Roger Parkinson recounts the events leading up to the infamous attack on December 7, 1941, as well as the air attack and its immediate aftermath.

Parkinson is not simply relating history but creating a sense of the tensions that led to the attack, using key documents and eyewitness accounts to underline the reason why the surprise attack succeeded. Students will also find the Pearl Harbor attack put in the context of Japan's ambitions in the Far East. Using sources from America, Britain and Japan, Parkinson shows how Washington and London tried to avoid going to war with Japan while the planned attack was already in action. Some of the extracts were being published for the first time after being released from security classification. Meanwhile there are several dozen black & white photographs from the period, many of which will be familiar to students of Pearl Harbor, but several of which should be new to such readers.

My conviction is that this look at the "Attack on Pearl Harbor" is not the first book a young student interested in the subject should turn to, but after they have read a basic history text this one will help them flesh it out. To be clear, Parkinson does not simply cut and paste excerpts from primary sources together; his voice provides the narrative framework. But then he uses such diverse sources as the rules set down by General Nogi Maresuke, the tutor for the Emperor Hirohito, the National Defense Act of 1940, Cordell Hull's Ten Point Note, and the memoirs of Winston Churchill. Parkinson divides the book into eight chapters, but each page has subheadings in the margins that will help you follow the historical chronology and effectively outline the chapters.

The other volumes in the Documentary History Series look at not just events from the 20th century such as "Italy Under Mussolini," "Hiroshima," and "The Cold War," but cover topics all the way back to "The Vikings." Actually a lot of the volumes books go back more than a few centuries, with "The Black Death and Peasant's Revolt," "The Trial and Execution of Charles I," and "Battle of the Spanish Armada" catching my eye, mainly because the options for primary documents on some of those have to be pretty limited, compared to what you would have for something like "The Third Reich." It is the documents that make these volumes worth checking out because an appreciation of primary documents is key to an appreciation of history (and your ability to deal with primary documents will impress teachers a lot more than cutting and pasting things from the Internet).

This is a great resource for children and adults. The author covers different Pacific cultures (New Guinea, Hawaii, etc) and describes their unique contributions to world music. The text and book design (an ocean-blue motif that perfectly complements the subject) are both outstanding.

The Police and the Community is the most comprehensive book on the market looking at community policing and its wide-ranging impact. It goes beyond a simple description of what community policing is. Rather, it provides a comprehensive view with reference to a wide range of social concerns and the police role and response. Interesting topics are included ranging from racism to police brutality to international perspectives.