![]() In 1778, Captain Cook, the first European on Hawaiian shores, met his death on the Big Island, and that was just about the last time that Kanaka Maoli - Native Hawaiians - came out ahead in their interactions with the haoles (outsiders) who would soon flood the islands. It turns out that deadpan casualness may not be a useful stance from which to approach the story of the death of a nation - especially when those wounds are still raw and bleeding. More fatally, though, Unfamiliar Fishes reveals the limitations of Vowell's arch style. annexation of the kingdom in 1898 - is so complicated that her anecdotal structure isn't quite up to the task. ![]() Unfortunately, it's a method that fails Vowell in her new book, Unfamiliar Fishes, in part because its subject - the short and awful history of Western intervention in Hawaii, up to U.S. It's a method that served her well in Assassination Vacation, her comic examination of presidential killings, and The Wordy Shipmates, about Puritan culture in New England. Instead, her books and essays (often delivered, to great effect, on public radio) view history with a visitor's eye, as the peripatetic Vowell wryly comments on the museums, monuments and tourist traps through which Americans filter their nation's stories. ![]() ![]() That's long been her strength as a writer - she's no historian, and doesn't claim to be. ![]()
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