ISLE PAGES
New releases by Hawaii authors
"Hawaii Scandal"
by Cobey Black (Island Heritage, $22)"Island Fire -- An Anthology of Literature from Hawai'i"
edited by Cheryl Harsted and James R. Harsted (University of Hawaii Press, $14.95)"The 25 Best World War II Sites: Pacific Theater: The Ultimate Travelers Guide to the Battlefields, Monuments & Museums"
by Chuck Thompson ( Greenline, $19.95)
Reviewed by Burl Burlingame "Hawaii Scandal"
bburlingame@starbulletin.com
As scandals go, the Thalia Massie case was juice city -- aristocratic Navy wife supposedly mauled by brown-skinned boys, a high-profile show trial (with Clarance Darrow!), followed by the clearly racist murder of a defendant and scary echoes of anarchy in Hawaii. A Star-Bulletin series in the early '80s by Lois Taylor dredged it all up again, leading to at least two novels -- "Damned in Paradise" and "Blood and Orchids," which became a TV miniseries -- but Black has gone back to the source material for the real thing. She's done a masterful job of rewriting court transcripts and police testimony into a coherant narrative, and made the entire affair a tragedy rather than a racist polemic, which it could have easily become. The project is designed to be old-fashioned, from the yellowed pages to the deliberately hideous cover. An annoying quibble -- Star-Bulletin photographs are labled "Advertiser Library Photos."
"Island Fire -- An Anthology of Literature from Hawai'i"
A kind of "Greatest-Hits" compendium, "Island Fire' brings together under one cover bits and pieces of classic Hawaiian writing. Here's a taste: "The Queen's Prayer" -- in Hawaiian and English -- by Queen Lili'uokalani "Oranges Are Lucky" by Darrell H. Y. Lum, "Son of the Shark-God" by Alfons L. Korn, "Comfort Woman" by Nora Okja Keller, "Turtles" by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, "China Men" by Maxine Hong Kingston, "Ancestry" by Eric Chock ... the list goes ever on.The stories and poems were chosen by the Harstads thanks to their appeal to students and for themes that can be used in classroom situations to encourage critical thinking. But this collection is fun to read even if there's no homework involved.
"The 25 Best World War II Sites: Pacific Theater: The Ultimate Travelers Guide to the Battlefields, Monuments & Museums"
This little guidebook covers a lot of territory between its covers, and as a result, most sites are given short shrift. Capsule histories are provided for each site so we know why we should care, but there's precious little data on how to get there in the first place. The maps are so vague as to be nearly useless (ALL of Oahu is covered in one map; in another, Kanchanaburi's old Somdetprasangkharatyanasangworn Bridge is front and center for no apparent reason. The Oahu listings contain some errors, such as noting that Schofield Barracks was attacked by the Japanese (it was not), or wishful traveloguing such as giving the location where the Japanese consulate used to be. On the other hand, Parker's photographs are splendid, and it's handy to have all this information in such a small packet.
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