Bishop Books

This fascinating book was first published in 2002, and gives an up-to-date look into the history of Barra and its adjacent islands (the southernmost Outer Hebrides). It begins with a look at the geology and ecology of the islands, and then moves into their history, going from the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago to the enforced emigrations of the mid-nineteenth century. Along the way, the reader is treated to many pictures (most black-and-white, but some color), and a good deal of in-depth analysis.

While a little on the dry side, this book is, nonetheless, a wonderfully informative look at these islands. The authors led a team from the University of Sheffield, which explored these islands for thirteen years, often performing the first archeological digs ever performed on them. If you are at all interested in the Outer Hebrides, then I highly recommend this book to you.

Thirteen national award-winning teachers have contributed to BE A TEACHER, a guide for novices and prior educators alike. From special education needs and maximizing classroom impact to understanding what separates good teachers from mediocre, and understanding the joys of teaching, BE A TEACHER is the item of choice for educator libraries and especially for novices seeking expert advice from practitioners in the field.

Dostoyevsky once wrote that beauty will save the world. Carol Harrison's remarkable study demonstrates that such an emphasis on beauty is no less a critical element of St Augustine's theology. Not only does her book solidly establish the relevance of aesthetics in Augustinian theology, it also provides an excellent point of departure for thinking about the significance of beauty in Late Antiquity more generally. For this reason, Beauty and Revelation will be interesting to students of Late Antiquity and anyone who wishes to learn more about the multifaceted Doctor of the Church.

This is the second time I am ordering this book...lost the first copy. I am again considering a job change, and want to make a well-thought-out decision because the last thing I want to do is move-on and continue to be dissatisfied. This book is easy to follow and provides an excellent framework for factors that should be considered prior to making a workplace change. It helped me define the pros and cons of my current workplace and define what I am looking for in my new position. This book is good for people looking to stay in the same profession but interested in leaving their current company or moving to a new profession and for people looking to move to a new position within the same company. It's a relatively short, easy reading book with straightforward relevant exercises (unlike several other 400+ page books of this genre).

This is the second book for young adults in Claire Huchet Bishop's series on the lives of the saints and tells the story of Bernard, patron saint of travelers and skiers. It follows her book, 'Christopher the Giant,' a story of the man who was to become St. Christopher.

Simply told in modern idiom, this is the dramatic portrait of Bernard, who seems as much a part of this day as of his time (the 10th century, at the time of the Crusades). The rich, colorful illustrations of Maurice Brevannes, a celebrated French artist, lend a very lively element to the book, showing Bernard throughout the story -- first as a boy, later as a churchman, and lastly as a great leader.

Claire Huchet Bishop was an established children's book author when she began this series on the saints. Her books are true treasures -- it is a special pleasure to find the originals, published in the middle of the 20th century, so as to share with our grandchildren the books we loved when we were growing up. (Suitable for 5th or 6th graders up through middle school, perhaps -- but can be read aloud to younger children, and will be enjoyed by all ages.)

In 1931 Bishop Museum sponsored the systematic translation of all of Samuel Kamakau's articles on Hawaiian history and culture that had appeared in the weekly newspapers Ka'oko'a and Ke Au 'Oko'a from October 20, 1866, to February 2, 1871. Two manuscripts resulted; one, containing his historical mamerial, was published in 1961 by The Kamehameha Schools, under the title Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii. It is prefaced by a review of the life of Kamakau. The other manuscript contains Kamakau's account of the material and social culture of the Hawaiians before and during the early period of acculturation to Western ways, and is in the library of the Museum.

As in the case of the history series, the culture series was translated piecemeal by a group of Hawaiian scholars and the translations were gone over by Mary Kawena Pukui, the main contributor, and Martha Warren Beckwith, Professor of Folklore, Vassar College. Their work was completed in 1934 and is a completely literal translation, worded and annotated by Miss Beckwith. The present volume is a revision of the portion of their translation that deals with the customs and beliefs of "the people of old," ka po'e kahiko....

Almost all the topics covered by Kamakau are expositions on aspects of the old culture. However, Kamakau was an ardent, vehement, and highly vocal Christian convert, and his own well-founded knowledge of the traditions of his people concerning their gods and their creation myths led him into willful interpretations and equations in his zeal to show a comparable background of beliefs between the Hawaiian and Christian concepts of god and man. He reiterates the theme of a supreme god, Kane, who with Ku and Lono becomes a threefold god, and who creates heaven and earth and "the things that fill them both," including "first man," Hulihinua (or Kanhuilihonua), and the "first woman," Keakahulilani. He alters the Hawaiian concept, similar to the Tahitian, of a nether region presided over by Milu, and displaces Milu with Manu'a, a "Satan" who rules over an underworld with strata comparable to the hells of the Christian teachings of his time.

David Malo, in the classic work Hawaiian antiquities (Moolelo Hawaii) (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. Special publication), gave a broad outline of the ancient culture; John Ii's personal experiences, recounted in Fragments of Hawaiian history,, revealed the functioning of that culture. Ka Po'e Kahiko now adds those details which give new depth and meaning to those two works. The three are a composite picture of Hawaiian beliefs and customs as they were in the ancient days and in the transitional period of acculturation to introduced thoughts and concepts.
--- excerpts from book's Foreword

This is a classic work in Hawaiian literature. Written approx in 1840, the author bridges an ancient,pagan, pre-Cook Hawaiian world; and a new world of foreigners, private property, diseases, Christianity, and a struggle to maintain a Hawaiian identity.

Malo describes many aspects of ancient Hawaiian life and culture, including tools and technology, land tenure, religious practices, politics, agriculture, medicine, games and amusements, marriage and family life, etc. This text is still considered a primary source for knowledge of Hawaiian culture in the era before Captain Cook sailed into Kealakekua Bay.

Malo never quite mastered the English language, so Hawaiian Antiquities was written in Hawaiian. It is one of the few books in the canon of texts written in Hawaiian. It is especially valuable to linguists to have been written by a native speaker, and is essential to the modern study of Hawaiian grammar, syntax, and vocabulary.

Of particular interest are the many "mele" (songs) quoted. Malo believed, as many people still do, that the "mele" was the highest Hawaiian art form, integrating music, poetry, and hula, often in a religious context.

Malo himself seems a somewhat dispeptic sort. A Christian minister in the rigid mold of the Protestant missionaries, he disdained many of the customs and practices he describes. He occasionally disparages the primitive technology and culture of his people. Yet for all his prejudice, Malo's tone is usually dispassionate and objective.

He gets a few facts wrong. (Hawaiian surfboards may have been long, but they were never 30-40 feet long.) Modern cultural anthropologists must surely cringe at his omissions and technique. And modern Hawaiian language teachers are still sorting out his spelling and grammatical errors (hey, do you speak perfect English?)But nobody disagrees that we are very lucky to have this book.

I simply cannot believe no one has reviewed this remarkable book here yet. Where would anyone start....? perhaps that was the problem. Well, to start, this is a book has the aura of a work written in a time when you marked your intellectual territory and explored it thoroughly like a lost continent, gave it the most of your life. The travel, the endless note-taking, the sifting of sources, the drawings.... Yet it was a never a lost world, it was old, it had its technologies and accomplishments to stand alongside a trip to Mars. In this book find the "space ships" at the end of an evolution of a thousand or two thousand years or more. The European explorers stumbled upon islands and found people whose canoes could sail closer to the wind than their own, without the aid of metal tools, metal fastners, rope walks. Give the Pacific people some vegetable fiber, a log, a weavable tree-leaf, a shell, and the gathered know-how of hard voyaging, desperation, lost-at-seas, and joyous landfalls, and they express the material thinking of the human combining the solution of technical problems with the ritual and aesthetic. Where they could, they produced outrigger canoes of beauty that will seem strange and stunning to the Western reader. Where they could not, as on the resource-depleted Easter Island, they still nearly came up with something from nearly nothing. There now, I did what I could. If you call yourself a sailor, you need to see this book. You may read some straight through, but mostly I prophesize you'll sometimes pick it up, flip randomly to some page, and fall into engrossed study. --wt

I am truly astounded that this book is not ranked higher in terms of sales. This is an exceptional compendium of disciplinary (including psychologists, chemists, biologists, and physicists) perspectives on a very important, relatively unexplored topic: time. I HIGHLY recommend this book for people interested in exploring more completely the problematics resultant from a linearly, determinsitc conception of time in scientific exploration.