Presents the celebrations and customs of Hawaii's ethnic groups.

Information on cultural traditions including birthdays, holiday celebrations, coming of age ceremonies, marriages, and funerals. Description and explanations include anecdotes than emphasize the bonds these traditions create. -- From the back cover.

In this cumulative rhyme in the style of "The House That Jack Built," a family celebrates Hawaii and its culture while serving poi at a luau.

In The Taste of Kona Coffee, two nisei brothers, Aki and Tosh, fight to free themselves from the prison of old-world traditions and poverty only to find themselves bound by the constraints of neocolonialism. In Manoa Valley, set some thirty years later, Tosh, now a successful building contractor in Honolulu, must reconcile his image of the future with that of his son, Spencer, who dreams of life in mainland America. The third play, The Life of the Land, is set in 1980. Spencer has achieved his goals but at the cost of alienating himself from his family and his culture. Hawaii No Ka Oi presents an important aspect of Japanese American social history in Hawaii, yet it reflects the immigrant experience of other ethnic groups. These are plays with which Americans of all backgrounds can identify.

"A valuable library addition for either a folklorist, a linguist, or an ethnologist." --Western Folklore "The stories in this book are reprinted from Volumes IV and V of The Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-lore, published by the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in 1917, 1918, and 1919. They include some of the best-loved of Hawaiian stories, and the collection is probably the most important work on a traditional subject ever published in the Hawaiian language.... In the 1860s and 1870s, Abraham Fornander, circuit judge of Maui, employed several Hawaiians to seek out learned Hawaiians and write down their stories. The collectors included S. N. Kamakau, S. Haleole, and Kepelino Keauokalani, each of whom has made important contributions to our knowledge of the old culture." -from the Introduction