"Unfamiliar Fishes"

I was mildly surprised that Sarah Vowell moved to Hawaii for this book, but she was just following the footsteps of New England missionaries, and there's remarkable similarity between her attitude towards Hawaii and Joan Didions.

• In Hawaiian mythology, the people are brothers with the taro plant.
• There was much misery in harvesting sandelwood.
• Hawaiians considered themselves subjects of the British Empire, who was 'too busy ruining continents to pay attention to islands.'
• the decadence of coral bricks
• Hawaii was an important whaling stopping point.
• Morse of the Morse code fame painted several portraits of the early misionaries.
• Hawaiian featurework: 1, 2
• The motivation of the Annexation Club was to make Hawaiian sugar into American sugar, thus avoiding tariff.
• Lodge's discussion on the delusion of 'self-government' and 'consent of the governed'