Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaiiby James L. HaleySt. Martin's, 2014The Hawaiian Islands are beautiful volcanic outcrops conveniently situated between North America and the East, possessed of good soil, abundant fresh water, and some good harborage. They are, in other words, a place, one of many thousands on Earth - prettier than most, but still ground and water and sky. This fact automatically makes suspect any book that refers to the Hawaiian Islands as "paradise" - and since that applies to roughly 985,000 of the last 1,000,000 books written on the subject, readers (especially readers who've been lucky enough to visit the Hawaiian Islands and most particularly those who've been lucky enough to live there for any prolonged period of time) can be forgiven a certain measure of anxiety upon encountering James Haley's new book Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii.It's a discouraging pseudo-tradition, this business of cheaply characterizing Hawaii as "paradise," but fortunately, Haley engages throughout his book in ho'oponopono - the art of rescuing a bad situation and making it right. He can't work miracles, of course; his book isn't really a history of Hawaii so much as it is a history of the European interaction with the islands, starting with their discovery by Captain Cook in 1778. Haley sticks up for Hawaiian history prior to that interaction:

Precontact Hawaiians had no iron, but that did not make them a Stone Age culture. They had by most measures a highly evolved society, albeit retaining some brutal remnants of a more primitive time whose eradication need not be mourned. But there was also a large extent to which contact meant exploitation - economic more than cultural - and that is what needs to be put right.

But his main concern is Hawaii as it encounters the bewildering outside world, with the usual horrifying bloodshed kicking things off in 1779 in Kealakekua Bay:

Cook was stabbed in the neck and was then overwhelmed, clubbed, and repeatedly stabbed facedown in the surf. Four of the marines also died before the rest of the party was plucked from the shore. The Hawaiians immediately thought better of the violent outburst, and they treated Captain Cook's corpse wiht the same reverence as they did that of the highest ali'i. They baked his obdy in an imu, or underground oven, but only to make the flesh easier to remove from the bones. They did not eat him, as some British sailors came erroneously to believe - although three children did come across Cook's heart, which had been placed in a tree fork to dry, and believing it to be a pig's heart helped themselves.

That totally engaging, slightly off-kilter narrative pace is something Haley maintains throughout Captive Paradise as he tells some the mostly-familiar stories of great Hawaiian kings and viceroys and the notable outsiders they encounter as the island chain goes from being the playground of vulpine missionaries to the playground of Gilded Age robber-barons to being the playground of bumbling colonialists. It's a well-trod but still reliably entertaining story (and reliably depressing too, on the level of a dreary and prolonged imperial fiasco), and it's enlivened by Haley's very effective character-sketching. He intentionally casts his tale as a pageant of characters rather than as a sociological tapestry, and his readings of these characters are almost always refreshing, as in his assessment of Ruth Ke'elikolani, Royal Governor of Hawaii in the late 19th century, dismissed by her own peers as "crude, ungainly, and primitive":

She spent her life championing the language, the customs, and the heritage, and when she died her huge estate, which she had shrewdly managed and maintained intact, became the single greatest guarantee of their survival. That was a powerful legacy that has not been sufficiently appreciated.

Energetic intervals like that one fill Captive Paradise and make it worth reading even by the wary.