Hawaii Books

Pacific Images by Nordyke and Mattison gives an outstanding history of Captain James Cooks third voyage, from 1776 to 1780. The reproduction of words and pictures from this voyage brings together preceptions of the journalists and artists of the time. The pictures include animals and people (body piercing is not a new thing!) as well as activities of the peoples with sweeping views of the landscape. The authors did an excellent job of presenting the facts in vivid detail after two decades of research. This book not only looks like it belongs on every coffee table, but also can be used as an excellent historical resource.

This book is a history of all of the Pacific Islands. Oliver was trained as an anthropologist and lived for an extended period in the region. He draws on both his training and personal knowledge to not only describe the different islands and their groupings, but also to analyze the reasons for their cultural, political, and economic differences.

The book is divided into three main sections and an epilogue. In the first section, The Islanders, Oliver recounts the prehistory of the islands, noting their geological origin and development. He also discusses the first settlers of the islands, and how and why anthropologists have grouped them into Melanesians, Polynesians, and Micronesians. In the second section, The Aliens, Oliver turns to the subject of contact with Westerners, taking up explorers, whalers, traders, missionaries, planters, blackbirders, merchants, and miners in turn.

The third section, Metamorphosis, is the most extensive. In this section, Oliver identifies strong influences on development in the region, and traces how they have affected the history of each particular island group or island. For example, he notes how the development of a coconut economy was primary in islands such as Western Samoa or the Solomons, while sugar dominated the history of Hawaii and Fiji. Other influences were missionaries (Tonga), Mining (Nauru, New Caledonia), and Bases (American Samoa, Guam). This island-by-island analysis is followed by an epilogue, in which Oliver describes some of the ways in which the islanders and cultures have both lost and gained by their being brought into the international community. The events of World War II are also described briefly, but at the time when the book was originally written, the longer-lasting effects of the war had not yet become clear.

For a history book, the text is exceptionally clear and engaging. The analytical approach helps tie in details and makes the overall picture of the broad region much more comprehensible. The text is not footnoted, but at the end of the book, there is an extensive list of primary sources and suggested readings, organized topically. There is also an index.

The Pacific islands sure look different when viewed from Down Under than they do from up here in Hawaii. That makes "The Pacific Islands" a valuable effort both absolutely and relatively.
Absolutely, because it offers a coherent overview of the Pacific islands, of which there have been several over the years, but none quite like this. Douglas Oliver's two-volume "Oceania," published nearly two decades ago and based on a book he first published in 1942, can be regarded as an extended essay on the Pacific.
Brij Lal and Kate Fortune's "The Pacific Islands," if read through, has somewhat the same feel -- less elegantly put than Oliver's, because it is organized by topics -- but updated by several years, in which much has changed.
Though Hawaii's status in the Pacific is paramount in economics, culture and modernity, it occupies a relatively small portion of this encyclopedia.
There could be two reasons for this, both sensible.
One, unlike the small nations of the Pacific, just about anything you want to know about Hawaii (including a great deal that isn't so) is already available, so it makes sense to devote relatively more space to the lesser known areas.
Two, Lal and Fortune are scholars at the Australian National University, and their encyclopedia was financed by Australian foreign aid, so it follows that the South Pacific gets more attention. Micronesia is also skimped, relatively.
Scarcely one earthling in a thousand is a Pacific islander, and most of them are poor, isolated and, by any likely evolution of the world economy, foredoomed to remain so.
In an economic discussion, contributor John Overton writes "the prospects of successful competition by Pacific commodities on open world markets are poor indeed."
Similar instances of such beady-eyed caution are uncommon. The tone of "The Pacific Islands" is upbeat.
Too upbeat in the case of Fiji's fraught constitutional troubles. (Lal was personally involved in trying to sort these out. When this book was written, her optimism was not hopeless. Things have deteriorated.)
In fact, sometimes the articles have more the character of sermons than of reference reports. The outstanding example is the article on "Higher education for Pacific islanders" by 'I Futa Helu, a revered figure in Pacific islander education.
Throughout, one gets a close feel for how compressed the modern story of the islands is. The first colony to gain independence, Samoa, did so as recently as 1962. In places like Solomon Islands, modern institutions of various sorts did not arrive until the 1970s, '80s or even '90s.
It is a testimony to the strong cultural and kinship values of Pacific islanders -- a recurrent theme of Lal and Fortune's -- that the various communities have held up as well as they have. Seldom have so few had to put up with so much in such a short time.
The importance of organized sport also comes as something of a surprise. Here in Hawaii, we tend to receive more news of culture, one way or another, from the small island states. In this encyclopedia, sports receives nearly as much space. The "Hong Kong Sevens" (an islander variant of rugby) are a major event down south. Few in Hawaii, except immigrants, have ever heard of the sport.
That the book was written from an antipodean perspective shows up in occasionally amusing phrasing: National Football League games are called "matches," for example.
But there is also plenty of input from Hawaii. This is most noticeable on a particularly touchy subject, the constitutional history of Palau, which is related in three places. One article, by the well-known ax-grinder Stewart Firth, manages to be misleading by selective presentation without making statements that are factually incorrect. The same subject treated by Robert Kiste of the University of Hawaii is more balanced. The brief statement in the nation profile (by Kiste and Fortune) is so bland that the sizzle of this topic would be missed by the unprepared reader.
Another example of how perspective affects perception comes in the profile of Hawaii. The principal export earners for the state are listed as tourism, fishing, sugar and pineapple.
This was just reflex. Fishing is the principal -- in several cases, the only -- meaningful export of several of the two dozen or so island states. But it is trivial in Hawaii and will become even more trivial now that the best grounds, in the Northwestern Islands, are being put off limits, a new development since this book was published.
The Hawaii State Data Book is not helpful on fish exports, but total catch in state waters is valued at only a little over $50 million a year. Hawaii is a net seafood importer.
The encyclopedia comes with a CD-ROM which is searchable and has more maps than the printed text. It is supposed to be compatible with both Macs and PCs. It worked fine on a Mac, not at all on a PC with the same (Adobe) software.

It is hard to imagine now how isolated most Pacific islands were on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Sudest in the Coral Sea was a British "colony," but no representative of the government had visited since 1934.
Sudest society had undergone big changes as a result of Western contact, but the war lifted these effects to a much higher level.
Not until 1985, however, did Western scholars begin to consider formally how the islanders reacted to the war. It comes as no surprise to find that it is regarded on most islands as one of the two most significant events in history. (The other was the coming of the missionaries; and if critics of Eurocentrism want to carp, let them imagine whether the arrival of Martians would demote the relative significance of, say, the Civil War in the memories of Americans.)
One thing the anthropologists soon learned is that today, islanders temper their response according to the nationality of the anthropologist. Japanese investigators receive a generally positive impression of Japanese-islander relations, while the same islanders tell an opposite story to Americans.
Nobody has anything good to say about the Australians, however.
By accident, the Americans always did the one thing guaranteed to generate the best response from islanders: They gave food without expecting food in return. They had no idea that food exchange is the central social activity in the Pacific.
The Americans also were perceived as racial egalitarians. Although U.S. servicemen were segregated in those days, it did not appear so to islanders. Black G.I.s wore the same clothes and ate the same food as white G.I.s, which was new to the islanders.
Furthermore, the Americans, whatever their ideological views about blacks and whites back home, tended to treat everyone the same. Editors Geoffrey White and Lamont Lindstrom write that "islanders from many areas still recount their surprise and pleasure when asked to share a meal with servicemen."
Islander responses were far from uniform. Although, overall, America enjoys a high reputation in the South Pacific -- many islanders would like to unite with the U.S.A. -- there were some violent dissents. In the case of a few extreme cargo cults, there was an attempt after the war to murder or expel all the whites.
But for the most part, the enduring effects of the war were not between political groups but between individuals. Sikaiana women inverted the American stereotype of seductive island girls and composed songs rhapsodizing over alluring American boys, and their granddaughters are being taught those songs today.

A retired Army Special Forces officer and his former executive officer know something the Hawaiian police do not - the location of a vicious murderer. And they are going after him with all the skill, and some of the equipment, that the Army provided them. How they became involved, and why they undertook this mission, is the stuff of this fine second novel by Mark Higginson. (North of the River was his first)Racing from the golf courses and beaches of Hawaii to the ski slopes of Aspen, this engrossing read provides page-turning chapters of Enron-like stock manipultion, violent murders, stolen drug formulas, military training put to good use, kidnapping and rescue attempts.
The author has a flair for plot, and the twists and turns move the story quickly to its exciting conclusion. It is very cinematic and the scenes on the page remain in the mind after you have finished and returned to your own life. This is a book you will enjoy. I did.

Danny Yamashiro fell from the sheer cliffs of the Pali lookout in Hawaii and almost died. It served as a wakeup call and now he serves the risen Lord! If you even wanted to see what God can do for one individual, who then touches the lives of others....this book is for you!

We visit the islands every year. This is by far one of the best books for the Big Island. The companion books for the other islands are excellent, as well.

I'd recommend this book for all who plan to visit this lovely but fast developing island!

This book was first printed in 1925 by Patten Books in Honolulu. It is a fabulous collection of poems devoted to Hawaii as seen through the eyes of a visitor. Even non-poetry readers will enjoy the simply written verse which evokes a time and place which some think is lost forever. The author also illustrated this book with wonderful black & white drawings. To find out more about Don Blanding, visit www.don-blanding.com

The concluding volume of distinguished New Zealand historian James Belich's general history of New Zealand is an engaging, tightly bound look at the 20th century. It certainly lives up to the expectations generated by the first academic history of the country by a single author since Keith Sinclair's work of the 1960s.
Belich writes with an engaging style, mixing humour and deft usage of example with the broad brushstroke of well formed arguments. Dividing the period into three large bites (1880s-1920s, 1920s to 1960s and 1960s to today), the first part of each 'bite' provides a chronological mix of primarily political and economic analysis. This useful framework informs the less-chronologically restricted second part of the section, dealing with social history. The format works very well, allowing a logical structure where the histories of government, popular culture, racial issues, economics and social structure sit neatly together without jumping back and forth as in a conventional narrative.
Of particular delight for me are the 'revisionist' reexaminations of a number of events, emphasising and casting them in a new light. Examples include the 1913 labour crisis and a very good look at the 'Protein' industry which places it in its political, economic and social context superbly.
The two core arguments are those of Recolonialism and The Great Tightening, tying our history to our relationship with Britain, and the populist quest for conformity and harmony. The points are both deftly argued, with every theme being tied to them, usually quite convincingly. As with any argument seeking to provide coherance, however, at times there is a danger that other causes and effects can be understated and ignored. One instance of this was in dealing with the dour 'safeness' of the early postwar era. Belich quotes Jame Mander; [New Zealand was] "afflicted with the 'awful disease' of puritanism and conformism - 'barren wastes of Victorian philistinasm', 'brain-numbing, stimulus-stifling, soul-searing silence'". Although this is convincingly linked with the concept of 'tightening', another important factor, that of the search for security and safety in the aftermath of World War II is scarcely touched upon.
Belich's broadsweeping approach also uncovers the many holes in New Zealand historiography, however his guesswork in these areas, for instance in sport, is usually convincing and far more informative and thought provoking than ignoring them completely!
The first chapter/s of each chronological chunk give a fair overview of the narrative of that era, particulaly polically and economically, however the book is not a survey in the American sense. I feel that there is a need for such a work in New Zealand history, combining narrative with academic insight in the style of Henretta et al's excellent "America's History", (perhaps the NZ market is too small?). That said, anyone with a passion for history, or studying New Zealand history in particular will be very well served and stimulated by "Paradise Reforged"'s superb arguments and bibliography to explore our history in further depth. Can't wait to see Mr Belich's next project, perhaps a TV adaptation in the Simon Schama mode?!!!