Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Two new books uncover
By Burl Burlingame
Oahu’s rich past
Star-BulletinTHIS fascinating guidebook to aspects of Honolulu history suffers a bit from a split personality. Maybe it's just trying too hard. As a book dealing with largely ignored bits of local historiana, it's fine, filled with pictures, anecdotes and the kind of vivid ephemera that makes the past come alive; but as a guide it falls short, relying on written descriptions and directions rather than maps.
A couple of the small photographs scattered throughout look as if they were taken from the window of a moving car. That's not necessarily a bad thing (that's the view most readers will have of the real thing). The majority of the images are either well-chosen period pictures or photographs of the site or artifact. The book's layout uses spot color and duotones to dress up the presentation, but the use of thumbnail maps would have really helped orient the reader.
The meat of the book, however, is Dorrance's descriptions of the curious sights of this island, ranging from ancient Hawaiian locations to the mighty, abandoned fortresses constructed by the military this century. It's rare that a work of Hawaiian history treats the military presence in the island seriously.
"O'ahu's Hidden History"
by William H. Dorrance, (Mutual Publishing), paperback, ISBN 1-56647-211-3, $13.95
by Lyndall Landauer and Donald Landauer (Flying Cloud Press), ISBN 0-933185-06-5. 434 pages, $19.95
Also impressing, Dorrance included the island's landmark "plantation"-type stores, another gesture toward a complete and non-elitist local history.
Dorrance treats the passage of history evenly, coloring his descriptions only with anecdotal passages that illuminate the subject at hand. He also resists mythologizing his subjects.
"O'ahu's Hidden History" is a valuable addition to the lore of Hawaii's recent past.
'PEARL" claims to be no less than the history of the United States Navy in Pearl Harbor, but it is much broader and deeper than that, drawing on the entire maritime experience in the Islands.
To their great credit, the husband-and-wife authors recognize the history of the great naval base did not begin and end with the Japanese attack and World War II. These are adequately covered in chapters. There are better books elsewhere on those subjects.
The book is crammed full of nuggets, such as the cultural misunderstanding that grew out of the building of Drydock #1 and the horrible living conditions forced upon the U.S. Marines at the turn of the century.
Due to lack of competition, at the moment this book is probably the best and most detailed general history of Pearl Harbor.
"Pearl" is clearly a labor of love. Unfortunately, the privately printed work is not the labor of publishing professionals. The prose is stilted and often labored. Ideas peter out, while half-formed concepts ramble on.
At least their hearts are in the right place. The authors start off by awkwardly apologizing for using apostrophes instead of glottal stops in Hawaiian words, and indicate their reverence for the Hawaiian people by capitalizing them: Hawaiian People. Virtually no opportunity is passed to lay patronizing kudos upon Hawaiians in general. They're "remarkable," "astounding," and so on.
The authors pad relentlessly. Simple thoughts are restated in as many different ways as possible, and dopey conclusions are presented as historical fact. For example, the voyage of "Hokule'a" is trotted out as proof that Polynesians could travel thousands of miles across the ocean. Well, duh.
And another example: "Rainfall in the area is 15 and 40 inches a year." Which is it?
At another point, much is made of the absolutely untrue statement that the Japanese did not enter World War I on the Allies' side until a few weeks before the Armistice in 1918, and then only to grab loose territory. On the next page is a description of the Imperial Japanese cruiser Hizen stalking the German gunboat Geier outside Honolulu Harbor in 1914.
The potentially rich pictorial record of Pearl Harbor is confined to a few fuzzily reproduced images, some so poor that they seem to be computer scans of faxes.
The book's cover consists of what appears to be montage of Navy publicity photos, including the USS Constitution, permanently stationed on the East Coast.
"Pearl" is exhaustive and singular enough to deserve another shot, given editorial tweaking and new graphic packaging.
Click for online
calendars and events.
