The story I found most compelling was that of Char Nyuk Tsin, also known as Wu Chow’s Auntie, also known as Pake Kokua. (He probably thought (or his publisher did) that if he included the story of the Filipinos the book would be too long to sell.) The story of the four Sakagawa brothers and their poor sister (I will never forgive Michener for what he did to Reiko), and the story of the 442nd Battalion in World War II is sobering and instructive, and I’m pretty sure Shig’s story is the fictionalized version of Senator Daniel Inouye’s life. This epic narrative, 1,036 pages in length, is ambitious and all-encompassing.

Then come the Calvinist missionaries from New England who wrought such unthinking, well-meaning havoc on the native Hawaiian population, with help from the whalers and traders, who were all then followed by the Chinese and the Japanese imported by the missionary descendants for labor in the sugar cane and pineapple fields, although they sure didn’t stay there. Here he tells a history of Hawaii through the eyes of the different races who lived it, beginning with the Polynesians who emigrated in open canoes across five thousand miles of open ocean 600 years before Prince Henry the Navigator sponsored his first voyage, navigating only by the stars and a few scraps of oral history. Okay, Michener not the greatest master of the craft of writing, agreed, but he knows how to tell a story. It has held up really well in the interim. I first read this book back in my teens, and I was in Hawaii recently and decided it was time to reread it.

Michener hawaii review