Category: geography

Natural Hazards, the Environment, and Hawaii’s Communities

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Living on the ShoresRarely a day goes by in Hawai‘i without the media reporting on environmental issues stemming from public debate. Will the proposed housing development block my access to the beach? Is the rising sea level going to cause flooding where I live? How does overfishing damage the reef? Is the water clean where I surf? Living on the Shores of Hawai‘i , by Charles Fletcher, Robynne Boyd, William J. Neal, and Virginia Tice, discusses the paradox of environmental loss under a management system considered by many to be one of the most stringent in the nation. It reviews a wide range of environmental concerns in Hawai‘i with an eye toward resolution by focusing on “place-based” management, a theme consistent with—and borrowing from—the Hawaiian ahupua‘a system.

A Latitude 20 Book
November 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3433-3 / $27.99 (PAPER)

Save Big on the Atlas of Hawaii

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Atlas:Third EditionGet the hardcover/cloth edition of the award-winning Atlas of Hawai‘i: Third Edition for more than 30% off while supplies last! This essential reference, edited by Sonia P. Juvik, James O. Juvik, and Thomas R. Paradise, is now $51.99.

“‘Bigger’ and ‘better’ are probably the most appropriate terms to describe the third edition of this atlas. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

“If you’re an information junkie and a lover of well-designed books, the new edition of the Atlas of Hawai‘i will excite you as much as it did me. . . . This is a very well-done piece of work—a beautifully illustrated encyclopedia of Hawai‘i contained in a single volume.” —Honolulu Advertiser

“[A] monumental effort to compile into one beautiful volume information on basically almost anything you ever wanted to know about Hawai`i. . . . It belongs in every collection as the core source of information on Hawai‘i.” —Western Association of Map Libraries Information Bulletin

“The Atlas of Hawai‘i . . . should be on the shelf of anyone who is interested in the state of Hawai‘i or the human and physical ecology of a north Pacific island group.” —Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers

The Best of the Best: Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents

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Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific by Patrick D. Nunn, was featured in “The Best of the Best from the University Presses: Books You Should Know About” program, held at the 2009 American Library Association Annual Conference this month. “Best of the Best” titles are chosen by a panel of public and secondary school librarians as having “exceptional editorial content and subject matter” and are considered “essential to most library collections.”

UH Press Authors at the 2009 Ka Palapala Award Ceremony

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Jon Van Dyke (right) receiving one of three awards for Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i?

Carlos Andrade with Maenette Benham, dean of the Hawai‘inuiakea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, UHM

Jon Van Dyke (second from left) and his wife, Sherry Broder, with Divorce with Decency author Brad Coates and his wife, Sachi Braden

For more on the 2009 Ka Palapala Awards, view our 13 May 2009 post below.

Hawaii Book and Music Festival 2009

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University of Hawai‘i Press will be among the local publishers participating in the Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival this weekend, May 16-17, 10 am-5 pm, at Honolulu Hale. Admission and parking are free to the general public.

UH Press authors Jon Van Dyke (Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i), Heather Diamond (American Aloha: Cultural Tourism and the Negotiation of Tradition), Davianna McGregor (Na Kua‘aina: Living Hawaiian Culture), Carlos Andrade (Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors), Richard Hamasaki (Westlake: Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake; From the Spider Bone Diaries: Poems and Songs), Witi Ihimaera (The Uncle’s Story; Woman Far Walking, distributed for Huia Publishers, NZ), Gary Pak (Children of a Fireland; A Ricepaper Airplane), Robert Barclay (Melal: A Novel of the Pacific), Jon Thares Davidann (Hawai‘i at the Crossroads of the U.S. and Japan before the Pacific War), and Candace Fujikane and Jon Okamura (Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i) will be leading or participating in numerous panels and discussions at the festival. Click here for a detailed schedule of events.

UH Press Titles Honored at the 2009 Ka Palapala Award Ceremony

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University of Hawai‘i Press books were among the winners at this year’s Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards Ceremony, held on May 9, 2009, at the Bishop Museum. The awards are presented by the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association to recognize the finest books published during the previous year.

Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawai‘i, by Jon M. Van Dyke, took three top honors: Excellence in Hawaiian Culture, Text/Reference, and Nonfiction. The Nation calls Van Dyke’s book “definitive. Who Owns the Crown Lands of Hawaii? [is] certain to become the standard reference for that question.”

Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors, by Carlos Andrade, received Honorable Mentions for Excellence in Hawaiian Culture and Nonfiction. Andrade’s work is an ambitious attempt to provide a unique perspective in the complex story of the ahupua‘a of Ha‘ena.

Dying in a Strange Land, by Milton Murayama, received an Honorable Mention for Excellence in Literature. Familiar faces from All I Asking For Is My Body, Five Years on a Rock, and Plantation Boy return to advance the story of the Oyama family from the years immediately following World War II to the 1980s.

Haena Now Available in Paperback

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Ha‘ena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors, by Carlos Andrade, is now available in paperback. Ha‘ena received Honorable Mentions for Excellence in Hawaiian Culture and Nonfiction at the 2009 Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award Ceremony, sponsored annually by the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association.

Ha‘ena is a land steeped in antiquity yet vibrantly beautiful today as any Hollywood fantasy of a tropical paradise. He ‘aina momona, a rich and fertile land linked to the sea and the rising and setting sun, is a place of gods and goddesses: Pele and her sister, Hi‘iaka, and Laka, patron of hula. It epitomizes the best that can be found in the district of northwestern Kaua‘i, known to aboriginal Hawaiians as Hale Le‘a (House of Pleasure and Delight). This work is an ambitious attempt to provide a unique perspective in the complex story of the ahupua‘a of Ha‘ena.

May 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3410-4 / $18.00 (PAPER)

Carlos Andrade will discuss Ha‘ena and moderate the panel “Holding Fast to the Land” at the Hawai‘i Book and Music Festival, May 16-17, 2009, at Honolulu Hale. Click here for more details.

Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines

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Scholars have long assumed that Spanish colonial rule had only a limited demographic impact on the Philippines. Filipinos, they believed, had acquired immunity to Old World diseases prior to Spanish arrival; conquest was thought to have been more benign than what took place in the Americas because of more enlightened colonial policies introduced by Philip II. Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines, by Linda A. Newson, illuminates the demographic history of the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the process, challenges these assumptions.

“The book is truly remarkable in breadth and depth and has the power of a prosecuting attorney’s relentless presentation of a damning circumstantial case: the reader’s resistance gives way under the sheer weight of the evidence. We hear many different voices (some ecclesiastical, some civil or military) reiterating the same sad tale of depopulation and slow recovery. Others have, on less evidence, surmised some of this story of loss, but no one before has effectively estimated its depth or duration. The tale deserves to be told.” —Norman G. Owen, editor, The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia

April 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3272-8 / $56.00 (CLOTH)

New Edition of Oceania Map Now Available

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Completely revised and updated with enhanced readability, James A. Bier’s Reference Map of Oceania, Second Edition, is the most comprehensive Pacific map in existence. Its main map and 52 inset maps of all major parts of the region provide a wealth of information in one source. Principal cities, towns, and villages are shown along with roads, topography, and population figures where available. The main map’s Mercator projection is useful for planning routes. Time zones for the Pacific and individual countries are also included. It is the only map that clearly focuses on the political units of Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia, using as its boundaries the 200-mile Extended Economic Zone. With more than 3,400 place names, Oceania will be an invaluable reference for everyone interested in or living in the Pacific islands, including teachers, students, historians, anthropologists, businesses, and travelers.

“Making sense of as complex an area as Oceania challenges the best of cartographers. Bier and the University of Hawaii Press have risen to that challenge producing a manageable double-sided sheet full of well laid-out information.” —Special Libraries Association Bulletin

February 2009 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3108-0 / $9.95, color

The New Ethnic Community in Urban America

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Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America, by Wei Li, is an innovative work that provides a new model for the analysis of ethnic and racial settlement patterns in the United States and Canada. Ethnoburbs—suburban ethnic clusters of residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan areas—are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual, and often multinational communities in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration but does not necessarily constitute a majority. Wei Li documents the processes that have evolved with the spatial transformation of the Chinese American community of Los Angeles and that have converted the San Gabriel Valley into ethnoburbs in the latter half of the twentieth century, and she examines the opportunities and challenges that occurred as a result of these changes.

December 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3065-6 / $56.00 (CLOTH)

A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples

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Written by Alastair Couper, a senior scholar and master mariner, Sailors and Traders: A Maritime History of the Pacific Peoples is the first comprehensive account of the maritime peoples of the Pacific. It focuses on the sailors who led the exploration and settlement of the islands and New Zealand and their seagoing descendants, providing along the way new material and unique observations on traditional and commercial seagoing against the background of major periods in Pacific history.

December 2008 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3239-1 / $55.00 (CLOTH)

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