Review by New York Times Review
SOMETIMES I loved the disruptive student in class who livened up lectures with wisecracks - it put a spin on things, added flavor, made me laugh. Other times I wished the heckler would just shut up so I could learn something. Such were my thoughts while reading Sarah Vowell's latest book, "Unfamiliar Fishes." As evidenced by her contributions to "This American Life" and her previous books (among them "Assassination Vacation" and "The Partly Cloudy Patriot"), Vowell has a thing for rehashing history with a satirical, interjecting, smart-alecky voice. She Jays out the facts, then performs a kind of dissection, probing our country's quirks, mistakes and infirmities in an effort to understand the past and relate it to the present. She took on the Puritans in Massachusetts in her fast book, "The Wordy Shipmates." This time she's interested in the colonization of a different rock: Hawaii. "Unfamiliar Fishes" (the title refers to a Hawaiian scholar's grim warning that "large and unfamiliar fishes will come from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes . . . they will eat them up") is a whiplash study of the Americanization of Hawaii and the events leading to its annexation. Its scintillating cast includes dour missionaries, genital-worshiping heathens, Teddy Roosevelt, incestuous royalty, a nutty Mormon, a much-too-merry monarch, President Obama, sugar barons, an imprisoned queen and Vowell herself, in a kind of 50th-state variety show. It's a fun book, which is reason enough to admire it. As a resident of Hawaii and a descendant of both natives and missionaries (I stem from Abner Wilcox, the "Connecticut-born proselytizer" mentioned on Page 84), I'm probably not supposed to have a good time when contemplating the near-extinction of the native population. I'm not supposed to chuckle about the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, or the corrupt and inept King Kalakaua, or the depraved (though technically legal) antics leading up to Hawaii's annexation. Greed, death, cultural desecration, manifest destiny - what a lark! But with Vowell as tour guide it does, at times, manage to be just that. Vowell deftly summarizes complex events and significant upheavals, reducing them to their essence. Consider her description of the natives' cultural assimilation: "Three hours later the little party returned with big news from shore: Kamehameha the Great was dead. His son Liholiho was the new king. The kapu system was kaput." As Vowell succinctly explains, "The end of the old system was a natural side effect of the coming of the foreigners whose ships followed those of Captain Cook. . . . Natives witnessed haole sailors breaking rules willy-nilly. . . . Female chiefs secretly wolfed down pork and bananas when the priests weren't looking, and the earth continued to revolve around the sun." While Vowell's take on Hawaii's Americanization is abbreviated, it's never bereft of substance - her repartee manages to be filling, her insights astute and comprehensive. It's not surprising to learn that she spent significant time interacting with islanders and combing through journals and archives. A variety of voices are heard, and all sides are implicated in the old Hawaii's demise. When native chiefs still ruled, she asserts, they were "as vulnerable to the trappings of power as any other ruling class in the history of the world." And while she portrays the sons of missionaries as arrogant bullies who kneaded the Constitution and the Bible to their own ends, she allows that they "sort of kind of had a point. If Kalakaua had taken better care of his charge, been more mindful of just how fragile his tiny nation's independence was, if he had led with restraint and probity, if he had spent less, drunk less, gambled less, steered clear of that petty, greedy opium con, then his enemies would have been unable to swaddle themselves and their undemocratic motives in the mantle of the Magna Carta and 1776." While you wouldn't catch me making that case to the fiery proponents of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, it has crossed my mind. In fact, Vowell restates much of what has already been argued, but her delivery makes it fresh and immediate. Her riffs are clever and even her criticisms are oddly flattering. For a Hawaiian, it's like watching your friends, family and identity being mocked on "The Daily Show." Vowell's playful, provocative, stand-up approach to history is mostly apt and effective, as when she compares the initial encounters between Hawaiians and missionaries to "some sort of clunky prequel to 'Footloose.'" But at times her digressive shtick becomes tiresome. Here she is, for example, in the elevator of the Ilikai Hotel, making her way to the Mission Houses Museum to browse through letters: "Speaking of the habitations of cruelty, the Ilikai was designed by one of the architects of Seattle's Space Needle. It was the very first luxury high-rise hotel in the state. Elvis used to stay here. Its developer, Chinn Ho, was a self-made millionaire. ... Detective Chin Ho Kelly on 'Hawaii Five-O' was named after him. Which is a nice change of pace, since most things around here are named for long-dead Hawaiian monarchs. Like, I wonder if Chin Ho Kelly or Chinn Ho himself got their cavities filled at the King Kalakaua Dental Center." I have no idea where we are or what we're doing here. These are the moments when I want the class clown to tone it down. But in a whirlwind tour of Hawaii, bumps are probably inevitable. After all, you're sprinting through nearly 60 years of foreign contact and decades of Protestant education to the annexation finish line. For extra credit, check out Gavan Daws's "Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands" - or, better yet, read the books together and let the scholar and the smart aleck work together. Kaui Hart Hemmings is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Descendants." A film version will be released this year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 27, 2011]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Vowell's voice, familiar to NPR listeners, is something of an acquired taste: wobbly, unpolished, with a little-girl tone that some might find grating. Listening to Vowell read her entire book might be too much of an occasionally good thing, but she effectively tones down her vocal persona by providing a star-studded array of other voices. Reading her own comic tale of the history of Hawaii and its elected kings, fruit barons, and the mixed blessings of manifest destiny, Vowell punctuates her book with brief snatches of guest readers, passing off quotations to the likes of Paul Rudd and John Slattery. Their presence, low-key as it might be, enlivens the book, giving it the feel of dialogue rather than lecture. A Riverhead hardcover. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Displaying her trademark wry, smart--alecky style, author/historian Vowell (contributing editor, NPR's This American Life; The Wordy Shipmates) tells the story of the Americanization of the formerly independent nation of Hawaii, beginning in the early 1820s with the New England missionaries who remade the island paradise to conform to their own culture. The diverse characters about whom she writes include an incestuous princess torn between her new god and her brother-husband, sugar barons, lepers, con men, Theodore Roosevelt, and the last Hawaiian queen. Unfortunately, listeners' enjoyment of this otherwise compelling material is diminished by Vowell's staccato, monotone reading of it, and brief cameos by various entertainment industry personalities are not enough to recommend it over the print version. [The Riverhead hc, which was an LJ Best Seller, was recommended for Vowell's "growing number of fans and those with an interest in Hawaii's history," LJ Xpress Reviews, 3/17/11.-Ed.]-Dale Farris, Groves, TX (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ever-clever NPR contributor Vowell (The Wordy Shipmates, 2008, etc.) offers a quick, idiosyncratic account of Hawaii from the time Capt. James Cook was dispatched to the thenSandwich Islands to the end of the 19th century, when the United States annexed the islands.The author skips the politics by which Hawaii was admitted to the union in 1959. Within months, James Michener's blockbuster novel named after the new state became a runaway bestseller. Now, with a Hawaiian-born resident of the White House, Vowell's nonfiction report is a fine updateshort, sweet and personal. She's especially sharp in her considerations of the baleful effect of imposed religion as missionaries tried to turn happy Polynesians into dour Yankees. Earnest, intrepid advocates embarked for the place where Cook died, hoping to correct the islander's easygoingand, in the case of royalty, incestuousways. The invading clerics were soon followed by rowdy whalers who rubbed their fellow New Englanders the wrong way. (They were the "unfamiliar fishes" new to Honolulu's waters). The result was early empire building in the pursuit of Manifest Destiny. Annexation and the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani, the last monarch, was a destiny aided, ironically, by powerful Hawaiians. Vowell celebrates the early restoration of the hula, but she skims much of the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 20th century. The author presents the views of the islanders as well as the invaders, as she delves into journals and narratives and takes field trips with local guides. Her characteristic light touch is evident throughout.Lively history and astute sociology make a sprightly chronicle of a gorgeous archipelago and its people.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
