Hawaii in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

May 08, 2011 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction, novels, historical-fiction, popular-fiction, ultimate-reading-list

Michener writes in a clunky style and with mostly wooden dialogue--and yet I kept turning the pages and found this an amazing reading experience. I've read that Michener was an inspiration for both Rutherford and Uris, and I can see the family resemblance in novels of theirs such as Sarum and Exodus. (Even if Exodus was published before Hawaii.) By selectively looking at certain families and individuals, Michener attempts to tell the story of a place, the sweep of its history, and in all ways th Michener writes in a clunky style and with mostly wooden dialogue--and yet I kept turning the pages and found this an amazing reading experience. I've read that Michener was an inspiration for both Rutherford and Uris, and I can see the family resemblance in novels of theirs such as Sarum and Exodus. (Even if Exodus was published before Hawaii.) By selectively looking at certain families and individuals, Michener attempts to tell the story of a place, the sweep of its history, and in all ways this novel screams epic. It's not a great book--but it is entertaining and at times thought-provoking.

The opening phrase is "millions upon millions of years ago" and the first brief section, "From the Boundless Deep" tells of the formation of the Hawaiian islands and how life took hold there. "From the Sun-Swept Lagoon" tells of the peopling of the island in 813AD by people from Bora Bora, the Polynesian ancestors of the Kanakoas, whose knowledge of navigation and astronomy allowed them to travel thousands of miles despite Stone Age technology--bringing with them breadfruit, coconut, taro, banana--and slaves.

The next section, "From the Farm of Bitterness" was where I became enraptured with the book. It tells of the coming a thousand years later of the American Missionaries from New England in 1822. The later sections are more complex as other families, other cultures are woven into the narrative, and so those sections feel more dry and journalistic to me, and rarely do individual characters in those sections stand out. But here we have a more stark clash of cultures, between the Pagan Hawaiians and the Christian Americans--as well as the character I find the most fascinating in the book because of his tragic contradictions--Abner Hale, who is a mix of admirable, deplorable, and exasperating. When Abner opens his church, he chooses a slave as its first member and dares preach against the institution to the most powerful in the land, telling them this slave, this "foul corpse" has a soul equal to theirs. Yet to the end of his days he's incapable of seeing even Christian converts among the Hawaiians as anything but "heathen" and opposes intermarriage and ordaining Hawaiians. He lovingly translates the Bible into Hawaiian--but won't allow his children to be exposed to the language.

The next section, "From the Starving Village" picks up in China, and deals with the settling of Chinese into the land brought in as plantation workers. Char Nyuk Tsin is the indomitable matriarch of the Kee clan and this section takes us through fire, plague, the leper colony at Molokai and how sugar was the driving force behind the coup against the Hawaiian monarchy and American annexation. Char Nyuk Tsin is about the only character besides Abner Hale that really stands out to me as having an interesting arc of development, who shapes the world around her and has unexpected facets to her character.

"From the Inland Sea" brings in the Japanese through following the Sakagawas--and this was my second favorite part of the book, and among the most moving, as Michener depicts Pearl Harbor and the fight of Japanese Americans for full citizenship as soldiers fighting in Europe and then through one character takes us through a tour of the rest of Polynesia contrasting it to Hawaii. Michener lived through this era, serving in the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II--which might be one reason why he can bring the time and place so vividly to life.

The book ends with "The Golden Man" taking us from the end of World War II to the brink of statehood in 1959. Even that late in the book there were some insights and depictions that surprised me and a deft use of irony. One thing I didn't think worked. A couple of times in previous sections there was a line where the narrator intrudes with an "I" statement. There's a page studded with this in the beginning of the last section, and then the last few paragraphs reveal the book to be the "memoir" of one of the characters. I don't think that fits the personality and arc of the character, and I would have preferred the God's-eye omniscience had been kept to the last. Although it does make me think how many of the opinions expressed in the novel should be seen as Michener's, and what is really the character's and thus should be seen at an ironic distance. I also wouldn't agree at all points with the narrator's take on history and economic forces. However, this was one big fat book I'm very glad I read through. ...more

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May 06, 2012 Joel Judge rated it really liked it

A wonderful historical fiction about human migration, and later immigration, to the Hawaiian islands. Yes Hawaii is epic in length but it is an interesting, engaging and rewarding read. Starting with the first Tahitian settlers who battled great odds and the elements to arrive by canoe, Hawaii covers the period of first human settlement to the mid 1950's. Much of the book focuses on the Boston Missionaries who ventured across the Pacific to bring the Hawaiians the word of the Christian god. Hawa ...more

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