Read Captive Paradise A History of Hawaii James L Haley 9781250070395 Books

Product details Paperback 464 pages Publisher St. Martin's Griffin; Reprint edition (December 8, 2015) Language English ISBN-10 1250070392

Captive Paradise A History of Hawaii James L Haley 9781250070395 Books Reviews

• I've read a fair number of historical and cultural books on Hawaii, and this one is quite unique. The author doesn't seem to pull any punches and you get the story warts and all, and in much detail. He clearly did his research. I have only two complaints. One is that rather than telling the story in chronological order, he separates the history into topics. It's a little disconcerting to read different events, some of which happened before and some after ones that you already read about in an earlier chapter. I didn't find the constant use of Hawaiian names or terms difficult - if you're going to read a history of any country, that's part of it. My second minor criticism is the often stilted language that is used. Many times it is charming and quaint, other times it is too much, like someone who feels compelled to use words and phrasing that require dictionary use. Don't get me wrong. I write a lot and use a wide vocabulary; it's just that complexity for complexity's sake has little value to the reader. But, of course, the peculiarities of expression and stilted phrasing in the telling do establish a certain mood and tone, that is not objectionable. If you want Hawaiian history, I would still suggest the standard texts (Daws, et al.) but this adds spice to what many authors have made dry and boring and strictly factual. In my own view, this is an extremely valuable picture for use in the present. Hawaiian history as taught at some universities and expressed by some protest groups is ignorant of much of what Haley achieves with his story - that Hawaiian history is not a story of innocent native peoples being oppressed by imperial powers. It shows there was good and bad, deceit and cunning, oppression and cruelty on both sides, and that is what contemporary college professors and protestors either don't know or deliberately choose not to acknowledge. As I watch Facebook videos, for instance, of some of those involved in the Mauna Kea protests and hearings, it seems that some do not know their own history as they cite one-sided lists of wrongs done to them. Both Hawaii's leaders and followers had failings that led to bad results, too. In this regard, this book is valuable reading for all. A bit perplexing is how this book winds up. After page after page of patient plodding through the past, the modern era, indeed much of the 20th century, is condensed, almost as an afterthought and as a bit of an apology. My problem is that it overlooks issues of land control and political corruption, although there are good books that focus on that alone. All in all, a great work of scholarship and a useful addition to the record of Hawaiian history.
• "That Hawaii would one day end up a possession of an imperial power seems inevitable." Thus concludes James L. Haley in Captive Paradise A History of Hawaii. Hawaii was a pawn in an era of shifting global power, a central theme of Haley's book. He discloses upfront and unapologetically his intent to present Hawaii's saga with objectivity, no easy feat given the controversial nature of his subject.
  
  Haley opines that there was a time when political correctness meant telling the Hawaii story as one of America's greatness, rationalizing the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands in paternalistic terms. More recently, the trend has been to focus on the plight of Hawaiian natives, condemning the exploitative behavior of imperialists.
  
  Haley argues convincingly that reality lies somewhere in between these two perspectives. Before the arrival of the imperialistic powers, native chiefs and kings at times inflicted unspeakable horrors on the common people; in the imperialistic era, European powers, and later Americans opportunists, exploited the simple and trusting people of Hawaii in a power struggle that ended with American domination.
  
  Haley captures the breadth of this complicated and troubled history in a seemingly balanced manner. His writing is a bit dry, but his facts are well researched and presented. The book is slow to engage the reader, perhaps in part because the names of people and places are so dissonant to most of us. But eventually Captive Paradise does engage. For anyone interested in more than the stunning beauty of Hawaii and its storied beaches, I recommend persevering and reading Haley's book through the final chapter. It will not disappoint.
• Haley’s Captive Paradise is a book that starts in very good shape and persuades the reader early with a simple argument The goal of the project is to provide a holistic approach to the history of Hawaii that a reader won’t find in any scholar manuscript or in a novel. In fact, the author argues that the book has escaped the academic stringent frameworks to detach from “(…) race, gender, and exploitation [that] have ruled the scholarly paradigm’’ (p. xiii).
  
  I was captivated and very enthusiastic with the project, and the first chapters on the ascend and reign of Kamehameha I are powerful and enlightening. The author succeeds in portraying a landscape that helps a reader to understand the importance of the first King of Hawaii beyond his critical role toward the unification of the islands into one single kingdom. Indeed, the treatment of Kamehameha was holistic, and it was fascinating to learn his relation with his “enemies”, how powerful and feared he was, and his strategic use of marriage to foster the adoption of Western arsenal and warfare techniques. With breakfast you can infer the quality of lunch and dinner, and the quality of the first pages of the book was good.
  
  Unfortunately, the following chapters are apples falling far away from the tree. The author fails on bringing his promised holistic view and instead overemphasizes on the religious aspects coming both from Hawaii’s elite transition toward Christianity and the subsequent role of the missionaries in Hawaii in virtually every aspect of the Hawaiian history. It is fair to say that the main characters of the book are the missionaries, leaving the role of sugar poorly treated. If one promises a holistic view, materialism should be part of it, not as an ornament to religion but as a building block of the story on its own.
  
  On a personal note, I found myself often thinking about other things while reading the pages of this book. The author’s style pushed me away, and after the first few chapters, I wanted to finish the book hoping that the tone of the first chapters would return. But it never came back. I think the author pursued a style that combined scholarly research and good story telling, but failed on both areas. I recommend the book for people interested in the religious condiments of the history of Hawaii, but if you want to learn more about the role of Hawaii as a sugar enclave and how critical this element was toward the dependency and later annexation to the U.S., this is not the book for you.