Irony salts account of Mormons in isles

"A Chosen People, A Promised Land," by Hokulani K. Aikau (University of Minnesota Press, $22.50)

Aikau, a scholar at the University of Hawaii, grew up within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the way Mormon elders dealt with Polynesians in their flock stuck with her. Although this book is essentially an examination of how the LDS Church came to Hawaii and prospered, there’s a certain fire in the passages that comes from personal experience. Mormons, persecuted in the American heartland, moved west into barren and forgotten real estate to establish a foothold, and within a couple of decades of the church’s founding, Mormon missionaries were proselytizing in the Hawaiian kingdom. The irony comes from the church’s identification with Polynesian races as a "chosen" people while at the same time excluding blacks from most church functions. "A Chosen People" is written with a great deal of scholarly analysis, leavened with dashes of love and exasperation.

"Hawai‘i’s Mauna Loa Observatory: Fifty Years of Monitoring the Atmosphere," by Forrest M. Mims III (University of Hawaii Press, $60)

The telescopes atop Mauna Kea are trained on the stars and the planets, and have become famous over the years for their scientific breakthroughs. But there’s another observatory atop sister peak Mauna Loa, and its focus is closer to home: the air of our own planet. Scientific observations on top of Mauna Loa were made for more than a century before a dedicated research facility was erected in 1951. Since then the atmospheric data collected and analyzed by scientists there has been invaluable for understanding the delicate environment of Earth. It’s entirely possible the theory of global warming and weather change is based upon their work. Mims, a well-known author of popular electronics books, also calibrates the Mauna Loa instruments. He has created here a massive and detailed history of the first half-century of observatory operations, focusing on the humans who work in isolated, cold conditions on the second-highest mountain in the state. This big book may be too much data for a Monday-morning scientist to absorb, and that’s too bad, because the work these scientists do is important. Between all these piles of pages and mountains of anecdotes, Mims does a thorough job of making that point.

"Random Views of Asia from the Mid-Pacific," by William E. Sharp (Savant Books, $16.95)

Here, in these islands scattered across the ocean, our view of Asia to the west is magnified by our relationship with the mainland to the east. Asia, in particular the mushrooming economic muscle of China, has put the region into an elastic state of flux for the last quarter-century. Sharp, an Asia scholar and former military intelligence officer, examined Asia from the Hawaii perspective for several years as a Hono­lulu Star-Bulletin columnist, analyzing the trends and events that shape our image of the most populous part of the planet. This book contains more than 50 of Sharp’s essays from the newspaper, and none seems to have aged badly. Despite the formal, plodding language, this is a useful reference point to draw on in the Year of the Dragon.

"Dear Gloria: Homesick for America in Wartime Japan," by Toneko Kimura Hirai and Taro Kimura, edited by Gregg Ramshaw (Carnegie Mellon Press, $27.95)

For Japanese-Americans the split between Japan and the United States during World War II has often been compared to being children caught in a hostile divorce between parents. For Toneko Kimura, growing up in the United States made her quintessentially American, which worked against her when she was caught in Japan when war broke out. To assuage her loneliness, she wrote a series of letters to her best friend in the States, a Jewish girl named Gloria. The letters were never delivered, and Toneko and Gloria lost touch in the maelstrom of war. After peace was declared, Kimura served as a translator in the war crimes trials, became an activist for peace, married and eventually earned a Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii. After she suffered a stroke, her younger brother Taro, a well-known broadcast journalist in Japan, discovered her cache of undelivered letters and thought they painted an interesting and overlooked picture of wartime Japan. Working with friend Ram­shaw, the siblings assembled an evocative and often heartbreaking volume of the terrible cost war brings upon the innocent.