Winner of the 2012 Ka Palapala Po'okela Award for Excellence in Natural Science The World of Bananas in Hawai'i: Then and Now--unique, comprehensive, colorful, authoritative, readable and with over 1,900 color illustrations--culminates nine years of exhaustive library research coupled with painstaking field and agricultural investigations in Hawai'i and other Pacific islands. It is the first book about bananas in Hawai'i and a major contribution to Hawaiian culture. It is also the first attempt to trace banana/plantain evolution within the Pacific. Truly a "banana bible," it is written in highly accessible prose embracing a broad array of topics. Lavishly illustrated, it covers virtually every edible and inedible banana in Hawai'i, Polynesian introduced and international, including the spectacular ornamentals and fe'i. The World of Bananas reflects a deep respect for Hawaiian oral history and esteemed post-contact literature, reviving long-forgotten traditional foods, chants, crafts, and everyday clothing woven from bananas. As a result of Angela Kepler's 30-year Pacific-wide ecological research, readers will encounter original ideas (e.g., how migrant seabirds likely guided Marquesan seafarers to colonize Hawai'i) and delight in the multihued tapestry of true-to-life banana tales from the nebulous dawn of Hawaiian history to the present (e.g., the rediscovery of legendary banana groves). The authors shed fascinating new light on Hawai'i's little-known "pregnant" banana, mai'a hāpai, and resurrect a long-forgotten minor goddess, Hina-'ea, whose curative mai'a lele banana once healed vitamin A deficiencies in children. Interweaving extensive original research with judicious gleanings from a tiny worldwide network of banana specialists, this book provides new, dependable, and pictorial descriptions for 140 living varieties and 22 kinship groups, illustrated keys separating similar cultivars, hundreds of name synonyms, and information on pesticide-free care and maintenance, nutritional deficiencies, and troubleshooting pests/diseases. The mouth-watering recipe chapter includes savory dishes such as banana mayonnaise and meat-plantain casseroles.

Almost 90 per cent of Hawaii's flora are found nowhere else in the world. This text presents a revised edition of a guide book to these and other plants that comprise some of the most unique ecosystems in the world. In a series of essays, the author weaves cultural and biological, historical and geographic, aesthetic and spiritual aspects of Hawaiian ecology into non-technical accounts of 32 plants important to early Hawaiians.

From the author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, an examination of Hawaii, the place where Manifest Destiny got a sunburn. Many think of 1776 as the defining year of American history, when we became a nation devoted to the pursuit of happiness through self- government. In Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell argues that 1898 might be a year just as defining, when, in an orgy of imperialism, the United States annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and invaded first Cuba, then the Philippines, becoming an international superpower practically overnight. Among the developments in these outposts of 1898, Vowell considers the Americanization of Hawaii the most intriguing. From the arrival of New England missionaries in 1820, their goal to Christianize the local heathen, to the coup d'état of the missionaries' sons in 1893, which overthrew the Hawaiian queen, the events leading up to American annexation feature a cast of beguiling, and often appealing or tragic, characters: whalers who fired cannons at the Bible-thumpers denying them their God-given right to whores, an incestuous princess pulled between her new god and her brother-husband, sugar barons, lepers, con men, Theodore Roosevelt, and the last Hawaiian queen, a songwriter whose sentimental ode "Aloha 'Oe" serenaded the first Hawaiian president of the United States during his 2009 inaugural parade. With her trademark smart-alecky insights and reporting, Vowell lights out to discover the off, emblematic, and exceptional history of the fiftieth state, and in so doing finds America, warts and all.