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Rhiannon Lawrence's Reviews > Hawaii
Hawaii
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I needed a bottle of wine and some stimulants to get through this one, and I'm Hawaiian! The opening is enthralling but skip the entire middle section. I couldn't get past the missionary section and had to keep a barf bucket close by... I loved the rest.
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Finished Reading
August 23, 2008
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Linda
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Aug 26, 2008 12:52PM
I agree. Kudos to you, because I never did get through it (I guess I should have tried the wine), and I'm a patient reader. Have you tried The Source, by Michener? He won a Pulitzer for it, and it's one of my all-time favorite books. I remember so much of it and I read it about 25 years ago.
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He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948 for Tales of the South Pacific.
Rooting for the shark when Reverend Hale was tossed in
The entire point of the "From the Farm of Bitterness" chapter is to make you barf.
The missionaries were conceited indeed, but stuff really happened. Michener was revered for his diligent research before writing about a culture/region. He was part historian part writer part storyteller. How could you not like reading about the missionaries when it illuminates so much of American history on that island? This book is epic and incredible in its scope. Sometimes you must read cruel and stark history to understand the past and present
I mean, Abner Hale starts as a closed-minded God-botherer who feels it's his duty to bring God to the "heathens", refuses to have his four kids associate with Hawaiians, learn the language or wear anything but stuffy New England clothes...even though they were born and raised on Maui in the 1820s and 1830s, surrounded by Hawaiians. Hale is not a hero in this narrative. He's a bitter, narrow-minded man who grows more and more bitter despite living in paradise. Heck, he even gets admonished by his missionary boss when the boss learns just how bigoted Hale has been over the years. But, he's the great ancestor of the many haole names that follow in the century after, and they have to wrestle with that legacy. The bitterness is the point.
chuckle chuckle chuckle . Michener's verbosity isn't for everyone . I read POLAND . And it only appealed to because I was a East European Studies major . An honest review . Thanks .Reading HAWAII right now .
