Comment

Jul 22, 2019SmartyJo rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
Reading /listening to this book made my visit to Oahu all the more meaningful. Thoroughly enjoyed touring the Mission Houses, visiting the coral church and cemetery, and Iolani Palace. Vowell provides a well-researched narrative of a shameful period in American history - the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands at the hands of the descendents of the missionaries. The paragraph from the book that sums it all up: In 1899, the British poet Rudyard Kipling published his famous poem "The White Man's Burden" about the new American empire of island colonies of "new-caught, sullen peoples." Four yers earlier, when Kipling visited Washington, D.C. for the first time, he met Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt dragged Kipling to the Smithsonian to show off glass cases full of American Indian artifacts. Kipling later wrote, "I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their contenent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed that they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to brutal mankind."