Book Review: Unfamiliar Fishes

The Snooty Book Club returned to the nonfiction genre this time around with Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell's history of the annexation of Hawaii.

Before I read this book, I admittedly knew next to nothing about the history of Hawaii. My bad. It really is an interesting story that shows how people's interests and values have changed throughout history. What inadvertently kickstarts the acquisition of Hawaii by the United States is actually what unifies it in the first place - the bloody wars of Kamehameha the Great. If he didn't kill people who questioned his ways, he wouldn't have orphaned the boy who would become Henry Obookiah. If he wasn't orphaned, Obookiah, with nothing keeping him in Hawaii, wouldn't have hopped a merchant ship that eventually landed him in Connecticut. If he hadn't landed in Connecticut, he wouldn't have met the wannabe missionary seminary students. If he hadn't met them, the missionaries would never have thought to send people to Hawaii to spread the word of God.

As it was, Obookiah and his new missionary friends arrived in Hawaii in 1820, looking to tame those heathen beasts. In some ways, it's your typical story of American settlers moving west - they viewed Hawaiian customs and beliefs with condescension and tried to squelch it whenever possible. But it wasn't nearly as bad as Native Americans on the main continent. The missionaries wanted to change the natives mentally and spiritually, but never really forced them (unless you count getting close to the monarchs, who then forced them). They actually succeeded in educating the Hawaiians, teaching them and helping them develop a written version of their so-far-just-oral language so they could read the Bible.

What started as a change in customs, religion and beliefs became much more as the generations passed. Soon the settlers saw dollar signs, rather than potential crosses, in Hawaii, developing sugar plantations and even shipping in enough foreigners from other countries to make native Hawaiians the minority. When they realized the monarchs threatened their ability to own property and make money, they made steps to overthrow them and then get annexed by the United States for their valuable Naval ports.

That's the summary, but what makes Sarah Vowell books so interesting is the way she researches and writes them. Half the time, it reads like a tour book or an easy-to-understand history book; the other half of the time, it feels as though she's just another visitor in your tour group, making wisecracks about how some correspondence between Anglo-Saxon revolutionaries sounded like a Randy Newman song. She includes conversations with local experts and researchers, not using their thoughts and citing them in footnotes but actually transcribing conversations, which succeeds in tying these events from more than 100 years ago to today. Parts of it were difficult to understand - Vowell often focuses on describing an idea, rather than going chronologically, so it's hard to remember the context of some of the different events - and I would highly recommend reading the book as quickly as possible so you don't forget the names of the major players. Luckily, since the book is only about 230 pages long, that's not a difficult task.