The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 August 2001
edited by Rick and Marcie Carroll
Most people think Waikiki when they think Hawai'i, some seaside convolution of Disneyland and a 1960s beach movie. Travelers' Tales Guides sets out to modify this image with this excellent "guide" book. Here are compiled 47 short essays and stories about visiting and living in a land of almost impossible beauty. Hawai'i has a rich and complicated past and culture, far beyond the mai tais and grass skirts down by the beach. People forget that this is a place where people live and work and share rich family life. This book covers a wide range of subjects, from cold nights spent in Haleakala crater, to warm nights in a deluxe resort bungalow. There are the Night Marchers and the fisherfolk. There are the legends and the cowboys. The incredible variety of the landscape, from arid mountaintops to claustrophobic jungle. There are even magical celestial events, from lunar rainbows to a solar eclipse. This creates a context for the traveler, perhaps enriching what would otherwise have been a blinding tourist whirlwind. While Travelers' Tales purports to be a guide book, this is more an in-depth cultural collection of life in modern Hawai'i. It is an excellent overview for the traveler and for those just interested in a place. The publishers have now taken to adding more traditional guide-book style information at the end of their books. While some of this information is useful (and this reader did find one or two small errors in this one), and it turns this book into a sort of "guide", it detracts from the otherwise compelling immersion in the islands that the rest of the book offers. There are certainly many more complete and detailed guides than the fifty or so pages at the end of this book. But this is not a criticism of the whole book, which has a great collection of interesting, amusing, and thought-provoking travel stories.