Page Turners

“Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor,” by James M. Scott (Norton, $35): Four months after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. struck back with a surprise aerial raid against Japan. Led by Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, 80 volunteers flew in 16 B-25 Army bombers from a Navy carrier to strike industrial and military targets in Tokyo and other cities. But James M. Scott, author of this vigorously researched, exciting account of the daring raid, also includes its human cost. Many of the planes crashed. In China, where surviving aircrews found help, 250,000 civilians were killed in a horrific Japanese Army retaliation. Eighty-seven Japanese civilians died. Airmen captured in Japan were tortured; three were executed. One recalls that before a sentencing, some “armed ourselves with toothbrushes. … We figured we might jab a guard in the face … to start the break.” The raiders’ spirit infects this gripping book.

“Rainforest Pu‘uhonua,” by Kahikahealani Wight (Bess Press, $24.95): “Haole way now, don’t look back,” her Hawaiian father told hapa-haole Kahikahealani Wight when she asked about their genealogy. It’s a conflict with which Hawaii residents of many different backgrounds can identify. In the mid-1980s, Wight lived for five years in Volcano, Hawaii, exploring the rain forest that became, in essence, her Walden Pond. Equal parts memoir, creative nonfiction and finely observed nature writing, her book, Wight notes, “cannot be understood without putting it in the context of my childhood years, when being ethnic anything wasn’t OK and when our community did not honor the Hawaiian language, Hawaiian culture. …” She honors it all beautifully in her literary meditation, accompanied by 62 gorgeous color paintings and photos by various Hawaii artists.

“In Love and War: The World War II Courtship Letters of a Nisei Couple,” by Melody M. Miyamoto Walters (University of Oklahoma Press, $19.95): Capturing the writers’ young voices — varying between playful, jealous and sad, but always plucky — the epistolary form brings immediacy and charm to this book by Melody Miyamoto Walters, a professor of history at Collin College in Texas. Walters found love letters written by her Hawaii grandparents before they married, when they were 20-something schoolteachers on different islands, and folded them into a narrative that “tells a personal story contextualized in the history of World War II and the history of race in Hawaii. …” Although both were Japanese-American, the love between a rich Honolulu girl and a poor plantation boy overcame socioeconomic boundaries, too.

“Taken from the Paradise Isle: The Hoshida Family Story, 1912-1945,” by George and Tamae Hoshida (University Press of Colorado, $29.95): Having wished he’d had more education, George Hoshida, who grew up on a Big Island sugar plantation, left school to help his parents and was sent to internment camps during World War II, viewed being shipped around the U.S. “as a tremendous opportunity to travel.” Editor Heidi Kim has built a moving narrative from letters, journals and Hoshida’s elegant drawings of desert landscapes and fellow internees. His wife, Tamae, and most of their children were later shipped away, but their disabled daughter stayed in a home, where her mother “didn’t recognize her at first, for her head was shaved … .” After two years, the family was reunited in Arkansas, where Hoshida made a lovely drawing of Tamae feeding their youngest, born during their separation.

Page Turners highlights books by Hawaii authors and books about Hawaii or of interest to Hawaii readers. To submit a book for consideration, send a copy and information to Features Department, 500 Ala Moana Blvd. Suite 7-210, Honolulu, HI 96813. Written by Mindy Pennybacker. For more information, email mpennybacker@staradvertiser.com or call 529-4772.