by Sarah Vowell (Riverhead, $25.95)
Reviewed by Adam Jones, Inklings Bookshop
Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell, the “popular historian”/NPR darling (oh yeah, and voice of Violet in The Incredibles), picks up where her last book left off. No, strictly speaking that’s not quite true. Her books starts with a wonderful analogy between banyan trees, the state of Hawaii’s history, and the popular “plate lunch” found throughout the islands. And that’s how Vowell writes: tying together unexpected ideas to create an approachable, humor-leavened understanding of a new subject.
Unfamiliar Fishes does follow Vowell’s last book, The Wordy Shipmates surprisingly well. Shipmates told the story of the Puritan settlement of New England; Fishes follows those Mayflower descendants as they send their tendrils out to foreign lands. There are surprising connections between these two subjects, and they serve as the author’s entryway into Hawaii’s history. For example, the first book written by a Hawaiian, a student named Henry Obookiah, was published in Boston by the missions organization that had educated him. That book galvanized the seminaries to send out the first American missionaries to Hawaii from Boston.
From these beginnings, the story picks up its pace as the island nation of Hawaii is fast-tracked to statedom by the missionaries. One generation after the Bostonians ate their first banana on board, waiting for the king’s permission to go ashore, schools (our current president’s alma mater, to be exact) were educating not just the missionaries’ children, but the Hawaiian royal family, as well. The surprising role of these missionary families in the creation of the state of Hawaii is well worth the read, and probably not something you remember from history class.
Vowell isn’t just a historian, weaving together far-flung stories to make a cohesive narrative, she also has a knack for inserting personal anecdotes at just the right moment. Her interaction with the islands’ geography and its architecture reference everything from “Hawaii 5-0” to Voltaire, and her thoughts can be hilarious and touching all at once. I loved her initial attraction to Henry Obookiah’s story (“I like how [his name] has the word ‘book’ in it”). She is also given to pithy, memorable characterization; the individuals just shine.
