Ebook: Books about Hawaii: Fifty Basic Authors

"What should I read about Hawaii?" Readers able to choose from the many thousands of books about Hawaii that have been printed over the years often wish for a reliable guide to the highlights of that vast domain. Such a guide is now available in this selective volume of reviews spanning the entire range of the literature of Hawaii from creation chants to the heralding of statehood in the twentieth century.

A. Grove Day, whose lifework has been presenting literature of the Pacific to a worldwide audience, has selected fifty notable writers on Hawaii as the basis for a series of informal reviews keyed to what he considers the best work of each author. All the genres of Hawaii's immensely varied literary heritage are here: ancient myths and legends, logs of sea explorers, journals, memoirs, spiritual autobiographies, travel as well as tall tales, and modern histories, biographies, novels, sketches, and poems. Each review focuses on a single outstanding work and provides biographical information about its author. Anecdotes and accounts of how some books came to be written are also included, along with comments on other works on Hawaii by the same author and references to related books by other authors. The main entries are arranged chronologically according to the subject of the book under review, thus presenting in outline a history of Hawaii as reflected in the growth of its literature.

Although each book chosen for review endures because of the intrinsic power or charm of its writing, the author's purpose is not to promote a canon of literary classics. In fact, over a hundred additional books about Hawaii, many of them as deserving of being read as the books reviewed, are listed and briefly described in the volume's appendixes. Together with its companion Pacific Islands Literature, Books about Hawaii offers to share the results of the author's more than thirty years of delving in libraries from London to Sydney and so to assist the reader on his own voyage of discovery.