Gavan DawsBesprekingen

This is a history of Hawaii that reflects the era in which it was written - the late 1960s.
It starts with Captain Cook's arrival in 1778. The amazing history of the settlement of Hawaii by Polynesian mariners from Tahiti is not covered in any detail.
We then move on to the reign of Kamehameha, which is quite well covered, but again with a strong slant to the perspective of European traders, settlers and vagabonds. The crushing impact of alien diseases which decimated the original population is barely mentioned.
Then comes the missionaries. A sequence of events unfolds through to the late 1930s, told almost exclusively through the eyes of the missionaries, traders and business settlers. There seems to be no curiosity for the impact of the changes on the lives of the Hawaiian people. Missionaries and Consuls come and go, but it is almost impossible to gain and understanding of the massive social changes that the Hawaiians undergo.
And so on through the development of the sugar industry, with the sugar barons virtually capturing the state, the mass importation of labour from China, Japan, the Philippines and the consequent social issues, WW2, and Statehood.
But gradually through the book, the author finds his voice.
From the start, the author is absent. Documentary information is provided without comment. And as the average Hawaiians left no documents, they don't appear. But in telling the story of the early 20th century, the author increasingly inserts the occasional comment on the documents - and what a relief it is! He shows insight. The evidence might be bland, but with the author adding his views, the story becomes more real. One doesn't have to agree with the commentary to appreciate the author's presence - but I found the comments valid and insightful.
So, a good book. A thorough coverage of the post European contact history of Hawaii, but sadly missing the human story of the original Hawaiians.

I was on vacation in Hawaii and picked this book up to get a better idea about the history of the now US state. (I was at an airport bookstore, so I didn't exactly have a ton of options to choose from to read.)

This book is thorough, and at times very hard to read. It goes into a lot of minutia about seemingly every encounter between Hawaiians and white colonialists to the point where you think "wow this book is well-researched" and "holy crap this book is boring and my mind started wandering a few minutes ago and now I'm not sure what I just read in the last three pages." This is the only book I've read where I thought that it would be better to watch a Netflix Original Series about the history of Hawaii rather than read it in this book.

Also, this book is extremely racist and pretty much glosses over every aspect of native Hawaiians, except that they weren't "industrious" like white people and preferred to spend their time dancing. On their own island. (The nerve of them!) This book very clearly refers to white colonialists (my word, not the author's) as civilized, and the native Hawaiians as savages. The bayonet constitution is only once referred to using those words, and only in passing many, many pages after first discussing it. The word "Oriental" is used so many times that I wanted to wash my eyes out with soap. I feel like even though this book was published in 1968, people back then should have known better, right?

I feel like I have a good idea for the broad strokes of the history of Hawaii (as in the current US state) after having read this book, but I wish I knew more about actual Hawaiian culture and history.½

2014 (my review is on a LibraryThing page, linked below)
https://www.librarything.com/topic/179643#4860144

919.6

This beautiful book portrays the extraordinary fauna, flora, and geology of the Hawaiian Islands. Having been published by the Nature Conservancy, the book not only documents the unique natural history of the islands. It also gives special attention to the importance of conservation and the special challenges posed by overuse by humans and the invasive species that we have brought to the island chain.

The book is organized by overall habitat, as indicated by the chapters:
I. Volcanic Origins
II. Coasts and Sea Cliffs
III. Drylands
IV. Streams & Wetlands
V. Rain Forests
VI. Summits

Each chapter is replete with large color photos, presented in one and even two page spreads. The photos show geological and geographical features, as well as resident plant and animal life. Accompanying text describes the illustrated features, and discusses the particular challenges of conserving them in the face of anthropogenic threats.

This book opened my eyes to the extraordinary natural history of the Hawaiian Islands, a place I have never visited or read much about. I was especially struck at how a handful of colonizing forms have given rise to such a diversity of descendant species. "One kind of drosophilid fly became 800. Three hundred fifty kinds of immigrant insects evolved into over 10,000 Hawaiian species. Twenty species of land snails became a thousand. Two hundred fifty flowering plants became eighteen hundred... And the native Hawaiian honey creepers changed so much as they adapted to the wide range of island habitats that they would have astonished Charles Darwin."

Despite the 70 million years of the islands' existence, "plants established themselves only at the rate of perhaps one species in each hundred thousand years. No amphibian or land reptile successfully crossed the ocean to Hawai'i. No oak, no pine, no sequoia. No big game animal came from America or Asia, nor any beast of burden. In 70 million years, only two mammals settled in: one for land, a hoary bat... and one for sea, a monk seal of primitive habits."

One final quote from the introduction: "In less than 6500 square miles of land mass, there can be identified more than 150 kinds of natural communities, each community a small island of life harbored within the larger islands of life that are the Hawaiian Islands."

Read while in the Galapagos. Wonderfully well written, insightful, and educational about a few characters I knew little about (Williams and Gibson). Occasionally, the analysis is a bit over the top, but tis just fine in the long run. Thoroughly enjoyed the book....½

Gavan Daws combined ten years of documentary research and hundreds of interviews with surviving POWs to write this explosive, first-and-only account of the experiences of the Allied POWs of World War II. The Japanese Army took over 140,000 Allied prisoners, and one in four died the hands of their captors. Here Daws reveals the survivors' haunting experiences, from the atrocities perpetrated during the Bataan Death March and the building of the Burma-Siam railroad to descriptions of disease, torture, and execution.
KIRKUS REVIEW
A wide-angle saga that adds a chapter long missing from official and traditional histories of WW II's Pacific theater: the story of the torments endured by Allied military personnel captured when Japanese forces overran Greater East Asia. Drawing on interviews with survivors of the Japanese prison camps as well as archival sources, Daws (A Dream of Islands, 1980, etc.) effectively combines the experiences of individual American, Australian, British, and Dutch POWs with a panoramic perspective. He probes why the death rate among the more than 140,000 men interned by the Japanese reached 27% (as against but 4% for military prisoners of the Germans). By the author's painstakingly documented account, the causes were legion: inhuman living conditions, starvation diets, an almost complete lack of medical care, constant beatings by brutish guards whose (heartily reciprocated) racial hatred of whites often led to summary executions, forced labor on construction projects like the Burma- Siam railroad, and workaday atrocities. Thousands more POWs perished when the ships transporting them from the fetid jungles of conquered lands to Japan were blown out of the water by Allied aircraft or submarines.

Shoal of Time may be tedious at times, but it's also incredibly comprehensive and fascinating. It took me weeks to make it through this book, and in the process, I created dozens of bookmarks for research purposes. The approach of the book feels very fair in its treatment of haoles (whites), native Hawaiians, and the islands' history of misunderstanding, racism, and political corruption. It goes into detail on the first arrivals of foreigners, to Kamehameha, to the takeover of haoles and sugar companies and American annexation, to the attack on Pearl Harbor, to Hawaii gaining statehood. I had no idea that statehood was delayed for years because Hawaii, with its heavy populations of "foreigners" and union labor, was regarded as a hotbed of communism. The book contains a lot of interesting data like that.

While the book did require skimming in spots, it was a good read overall, and I can see why it has stayed in print for decades.

Despite a few typographical errors, a wealth of documented infromation that ties together all society of Hawaiian history and motivations...not unlike today's state with the same problems and seeking some solution for a place so far from everywhere.

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