Queen Salote ascended the throne of Tonga in 1918, at the age of 18, to lead this Pacific nation through the hazards of the 20th century until her death in 1965. This biography paints an intimate portrait of Salote, from her childhood through her education and her years as queen, drawing on oral histories, personal papers, and newspaper accounts. Includes black-and-white historical and personal photographs. Hixon has produced a number of works documenting life in traditional communities. She was encouraged to write this book by the Tongan royal family.

When Queen Salote of Tonga attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London in 1953, she was greeted as the tallest queen of the smallest kingdom and gained universal admiration for her natural dignity and the warmth of her personality. This account of Queen Salote's life and times is more than a biography, for it also describes the politics and social structure of a small kingdom that was a world in microcosm.

When Simon and Fiona embark on a quest to track down the Queen of Tonga, they have no idea they'll end up marooned on a desert island. No idea they'll encounter an undiscovered tribe, rescue a drowning actress, learn jungle survival from a commando, and attend cultural ceremonies few Westerners have seen. As they find out who hooks up, who breaks up, who cracks up, and who throws up, will they fulfil Simon's ambition to see the queen, or will they be distracted by insomniac chickens, grunting wild piglets, and the easy-going Tongan lifestyle?

This biography of Queen Salote of Tonga is also a political & social history of the kingdom of Tonga between 1900 & 1965. It looks at aspects of Tongan society, especially the role of rank, status & of the leading families & the Queen's skill in keeping the loyalty of her people.

Have women always been subordinated? If not, why and how did women’s subordination develop? Kinship to Kingship was the first book to examine in detail how and why gender relations become skewed when classes and the state emerge in a society. Using a Marxist-feminist approach, Christine Ward Gailey analyzes women’s status in one society over three hundred years, from a period when kinship relations organized property, work, distribution, consumption, and reproduction to a class-based state society. Although this study focuses on one group of islands, Tonga, in the South Pacific, the author discusses processes that can be seen through the neocolonial world. This ethnohistorical study argues that evolution from a kin-based society to one organized along class lines necessarily entails the subordination of women. And the opposite is also held to be true: state and class formation cannot be understood without analyzing gender and the status of women. Of interest to students of anthropology, political science, sociology, and women’s studies, this work is a major contribution to social history.

The author of The Great Railway Bazaar explores the South Pacific by kayak: “This exhilarating epic ranks with [his] best travel books” (Publishers Weekly). In one of his most exotic and adventuresome journeys, travel writer Paul Theroux embarks on an eighteen-month tour of the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines. Along the way, Theroux meets the king of Tonga, encounters street gangs in Auckland, and investigates a cargo cult in Vanuatu. From Australia to Tahiti, Fiji, Easter Island, and beyond, this exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming observations and high adventure.