The most recommended books about Hawaii

Hawaiian Antiquities, published in 1903, was translated into English from the nineteenth-century writings of David Malo (1795–1853). Malo was a major scholar of Old Hawai‘i who spent his life among the courts of the kings and chiefs, where he learned traditional practices and oral traditions. His writings cover a wide range of topics, including cosmogony, origins and genealogy, social classes, geography (land, sea, and sky and clouds, winds, and rains), the calendar (seasons, months, and days), flora and fauna, fishing and farming, houses and canoes, food and clothing, sports and games, religious worship and observances, healing practices and necromancy, and traditions about the ancient kings of Hawai‘i.

Bamboo Ridge Press was established in 1978 to publish the multiethnic literature of Hawai’i. In this selection the best of its first eight years, the writers, of various ancestries, celebrate their families, cultures, and traditions, but also the cultures and traditions of others—a Hawaiian poet writes about a Tang fisherman; a poet of Chinese-Japanese ancestry and a writer of Puerto Rican ancestry reflect on Hawaiian activism; a white poet features bodhisattvas and Kuan Yin while another dedicates her song to a Hawaiian musician. Native Hawaiian writers are underrepresented in this collection published during a renaissance of Hawaiian culture, but a year earlier, in 1985, Bamboo Ridge also published Mālama: Hawaiian Land and Sea, an anthology of Native Hawaiian writers.

Isabella Bird was one of the great female adventurers of the 19th century. She spent six months in the Sandwich Isles (now Hawaii) in 1873 and then traveled in the Rocky Mountains, at a time when Colorado was discussing statehood. Bird’s writing still inspires to this day.

Contemporary author Linda Ballou expands Bird’s unique story in Embrace of the Wild. Ballou deftly digs into Bird’s culture and experience as a women adventurer of those days, bringing Bird again to life for all her fans.

Princess Victoria Kaʻiulani is among those brave real-life heroines who remain inspiring despite terrible tragedies, in Kaʻiulani’s case the theft of the Hawaiian kingdom in a coup by white planters in 1893 when she was only seventeen, and her shockingly premature death only six years later, at twenty-three, after being caught far from shelter in a chilling Hawaiʻi rain storm. 

In those six years, she became a figure on the world stage, welcomed by the royal houses of Europe as the forceful, articulate, and beautiful advocate (educated in England) pleading for the Hawaiian Kingdom’s formal diplomatic recognition and its return by the United States. 

U.S. annexation, an admitted wrong, might have been righted by her efforts had not Alfred Thayer Mahan’s relentless crusade persuaded Congress and the President that the U.S. needed Pearl Harbor to project U.S. naval power across the Pacific. 

Ironically, Kaʻiulani’s planned marriage to a Japanese prince,… show more.

Through friendships with Borinqueñxs and interest in the island, I don’t consider myself wholly ignorant about Puerto Rico. Like the Philippines, Puerto Rico was claimed by the US following the Spanish American War, but once again, when I tried to learn more about that era, I ran into a brick wall. Marisel Vera recovers that history while offering all the pleasures of a traditional family saga. She brings the reader close to the daily lives and loves of a family of coffee farmers who struggle first under Spanish rule and then the system established by the US. Vera also taught me something I’d never heard of: the deceptive recruitment that carried newly impoverished but still hopeful Puerto Ricans off to Hawaii to labor in the sugar fields. 

Jessica Machado’s father is Hawaiian and her mother is from the American South, a factor that looms large in a place like Hawaiʻi.

As a child, Machado senses that her life is complicated by history and context, but doesn’t have the words to formulate the questions brewing within.

In this touching coming-of-age memoir, Machado grapples with some of the same haunting questions and uncertainties that inspired my writing of my book while taking us on a journey to discover if her unshakeable connection to Hawaiʻi is a blessing, a burden, or a responsibility she’s lucky to have.

A must-read for anyone who has ever left home wondering how to take it with them.

T.W. Neal grows up with parents who opt to live on a sparsely populated Hawaiian island, not wearing clothes, surfing, smoking Marijuana, and eating magic mushrooms. The family lives in a van or in housing with few modern amenities and the author attends school on the island only sporadically. Due to her mother’s mental illness and her father’s alcohol abuse, she at times, has to run the household. With difficulty she connects with relatives and a few teachers and begins to reach for a lifeline to break free from the life her parents chose. She wants to go to college and eventually is able to leave the island and pursue a mainstream life. It is astounding that a person growing up in such circumstances would have the desire and determination to forge a different life.

Unfamiliar Fishes, is one of my favorite contemporary examples of travel writing because it is funny. Vowell turns her travelogue about Hawaii into a full history told with a quirky sense of humor. Nothing escapes her wit – from the greed of the early Americans who took over the island to the tourists like her trying to discover it under the layers of manufactured culture. She ends up loving the place, of course, like all the best travel writers.

I love this book as it enables me to travel vicariously. It is not a conventional travel book, even though it is filled with the stories of a kaleidoscope of Hawaiian people. Nor is it a straightforward cookery book although it contains plenty of recipes for intriguing dishes such as ‘Okinawan Pig’s Feet Soup’ and a biscuit version of bread and butter pudding known as ‘Nihau pudding’. Nor is it a conventional history book although we learn a great deal about Hawaii’s history while Laudan tells us about ‘plate lunches’ and poke (a sort of sushimi), musubi (rice balls), and ‘shave ice’. Instead, The Food of Paradise is a delightful combination of all three genres which captures the flavour (in every sense of the word) of Hawaii.

What starts out as a camping trip in remote Halape for a boy scout troop from Hilo turns desperate when an earthquake hits and their camp is devastated by a tsunami. The boys are scattered, and it’s up to Dylan and his nemesis Louie to reunite the troop and get them to safety. Inspired by real events that I remember, this book is a survival story about friendship, leadership, and teamwork that keeps readers on the edge of their seats.