Customer Reviews

Books About Hawaii: Fifty Basic Authors

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This book seemed to skim the surface of things. As I read, I was never confident that I was getting information on fifty "basic" writers of Hawaii. Nor was I sure what "basic" meant in this case. As I read, I felt that I was on the receiving end of an exercise: "Quick, write a short book about 50 basic authors of/about Hawaii." I wish this book had more depth, or more information.

Grove Day was a teacher and a prolific anthologizer in Hawaii. His selections are still plentiful at airport snack shops and tourist-oriented Stop-n-Robs. I always found his collections a little off kilter, and "Books about Hawaii" fits right in.

If you are new to this interesting place, an hour spent with Grove's little guide would not be completely amiss. But it would be partly amiss.

Day says he chose his list not merely for importance but for readability. Well, fine, it's not David Forbes's massive and complete "Hawaiian National Bibliography," which hadn't been written when this little book was published.

So Day left out all scientific works, although Hawaii has been a research laboratory of world importance for fields like astronomy, vulcanology, evolutionary biology, geophysics, plant physiology and oceanography. But if that's his standard, why include unobtainable books like Kotzebue's two volumes of voyages or numerous privately printed volumes written by descendants of missionary families?

In a sense, Day`s 50 are "basic," that is, heavily weighted toward the early days of contact with literate people. Scanning this book will give a modest sense of the early, fact (or fiction) packed volumes that introduced Hawaii to the outside world. But that`s not true of the occasional novels on the list. Marjorie Sinclair may have been, as Day proposed, the "best woman novelist of post-war Hawaii," but she`s not basic to anything. Perhaps he was just protecting his rear among the faculty at the U. of Hawaii.

Well, "Books about Hawaii" is what it is, or was. It's 30 years out of date now, which does no damage to Day's opinions about works of the Kingdom period. But a lot has been published since 1977.

I would not presume to pick out what was basic, but as examples of important and readable books of the past generation, there's Marshall Sahlins and Patrick Kirch's "Anahulu" on the archaeology of an early Kingdom settlement; Wagner and Sohmer's "Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawaii"; Forbes's "Bibliography"; Walter Dudley's "Tsunami"; Thomas Buell's "Quiet Warrior" about the greatest military mind ever to reside in an American skull (published in 1974 but missed by Day); and a lot of fiction not written by haoles. There is also a long shelf of recent books about being Hawaiian, some of it controversial.

In a supplement of books that did not make his Top 50, Day gives thumbnail mentions of 150 other books, including Milton Murayama's "All I Asking for is My Body," the opening installment of a trilogy that is basic by anybody`s standards, Day completely missed the significance of Murayama, the first writer to use pidgen in fiction; and the harbinger of a flood of writing that is mostly of the "local color" variety but occasionally does much better.

After Murayama broke the door open on behalf of the AJAs, most of the islands' other non-white ethnic groups had a go. While they haven't produced any Great Hawaiian Novels yet, they have done much better with short stories, and there are plenty of collections of them from Bamboo Ridge Press; and more specialized ones published by and for particular groups, like "Yabo" for the Korean-Americans.

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