Hawaii

Well, that only took a month. This book was purchased late in June on what can only be described as a total whim. I'd never heard of the book or the author, but I was about to take a week-long vacation in the state the book is named for. Despite having like thirty books already, I figured one more couldn't hurt. The thing is, this bad boy was over a thousand pages long. 1,036, to be precise. In fact, Hawaii was the longest book I can ever remember reading. And this was a strong thousand-pager; the font was small, there were no introductions or end notes that would pad the length, and the shortest version I can find for sale on the Internet is 937 pages (while the longest reaches almost 1,300). So yeah. Legitimately a four-figure page count. But enough about how long the book was; what you all care about is what filled those pages. And really, there's no way to describe the book aside from saying that it was the story of Hawaii. In fact, the island group itself was literally the main "character" of the first twenty pages, which simply described the formation of the islands over the course of millions of years. Then came a chapter on the original Polynesian inhabitants, who sailed all the way to Hawaii in the year 800 without even knowing that it existed. From Bora Bora! That's 3,000 miles. Oh, and yeah - in canoes! Crazy. The next chapter was about the New England missionaries who went off to civilize the islands (i.e., to decry their gods and customs under the threat of eternal hellfire). Next came a chapter on some Chinese immigrants who came in the 1860s, essentially as indentured servants for the very wealthy descendants of the pious missionaries. Then the Japanese showed up, some time around 1900, as plantation workers. The book concludes in the 1950s, when it was written, after the close of World War II but just before Hawaii achieved statehood. The book was actually quite engrossing and enjoyable. I probably read eight or ten separate life stories over the course of the book, of Polynesians, whites, and Asians alike. In fact, much of the narrative takes place in a non-Hawaiian setting; Tahiti, Bora Bora, New England, California, China, Japan, Italy, and France were all prominent settings at one time or another. This was a story about the people who came to Hawaii, albeit at different times and for different reasons. Though their races and origins ranged from all reaches of the Pacific rim, they all shared one thing in common: they dared to begin their lives anew in a strange and unknown land. And they all contributed to Hawaii in their own ways. Toward the end of the book, one visitor scoffs that Hawaii has no identity. She points out that a Chinese girl is wearing a Tahitian grass skirt while doing a Polynesian dance to an American song being played on a Portuguese ukulele by a Japanese man from California. And of course, as a Hawaiian man points out to her, this total blending of cultures is exactly what the identity of Hawaii consists of. Michener did a phenomenal job at breaking up a thousand pages into dozens upon dozens of relevant topics. The frightening human sacrifice rituals of the ancient Polynesians, for example, made for a thrilling twenty-page chunk. Another very immersing thirty pages were spent in the leper colony on Molokai where I read in horror as several beloved characters lost their hands, feet, and faces to leprosy. A lesson in lingual history took up just three or five pages as it was revealed that the only reason the modern Hawaiian alphabet consists of only 12 letters is the fact that early white missionaries did such a piss-poor job at preserving the language with the Latin alphabet; the land was actually called "Havaiki" and its biggest city "Honoruru," but the Americans taught Hawaiians to use W in place of V, L in place of R, P in place of B, and so on. A tragedy, really, in its own right. Speaking of tragedies, the attack on Pearl Harbor took up about ten pages, but the involvement by four Japanese-Americans from Hawaii in World War II took up another forty or so. Even seemingly mundane issues - the process of irrigating the fields, the hybridization of the perfect pineapple, the construction of various infrastructure - are narrated in an interesting way. I'll admit that at times I wanted to start skimming sections of this book, but every time I even began to do so, I'd be sucked right back in within a page; it was a good book from cover to cover, lengthy as it was. I suppose I can neither recommend this book (it was very, very long) nor tell you to avoid it (it was honestly very good). But take that trade-off however you want to. In my case, though I'm glad I read it, I'm also glad it's finally over. I've got a backlog to go through, after all.