Reviews for Autobiography of Protest in Hawaii

The average rating for Autobiography of Protest in Hawaii based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-31 00:00:00 Diego Basualdo This is a series of interviews with activists in Hawaii, I would say Marxist or Marxist-leaning. I didn't love it, and part of it may be that I read it directly after Hanahana, which was a book of interviews with working class Hawaiian people. The thing that Hanahana really had going for it was that the editors had interviewed hundreds of people from all walks of life and had included the ten or twelve interviews that were the most complete and provided a good representation. The (now-deceased) editors of this book admit in their introduction that they did not spend much time in Hawaii doing these interviews and that they stayed on one island. They also say that they only came to the Native Hawaiian sovereignty activists partway through their interview period. I think this book suffers from their focusing on narrow social circles but including several similar activists per circle. After reading several interviews, I realized I was hearing about the same organizations and university departments over and over. Also, several of the activists had somewhat of the same trajectory--- grew up on the mainland, were radicalized in college, and moved to Hawaii to apply their Marxist activism. I think the editors would have ended up with a more comprehensive book if they had cut some of the superfluous interviews and expanded their range to other islands or kinds of projects. I have to admit that in the middle of the book, I started skipping interviews that sounded like previous ones and jumped to the Native Hawaiian sovereignty section, which I found the most compelling. Despite the criticism, I appreciate that the book recorded the experiences of this group of people.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-01-22 00:00:00 Wendy Phillips This collection was a good snapshot of activism in Hawai'i in the early 90s. It is interesting to read it so many years later, and to think about what has changed in that time period. For example, one of the interviewees talked about how America wasn't doing research on AIDS, that places like Australia were prioritizing such research, but that we weren't...how would they have known then how far we would come with AIDS treatments in the past 20 years? It is also great to see so many familiar names, and to know that many of the activists interviewed who are still alive are still volunteering in the community.