Hawai'i One Summer

By Maxine Hong Kingston

Book Overview

"I did not wait for twenty years to write the pieces in this book, which is like a diary. There is sometimes only a week or two between an event and my writing about it. I wrote about my son's surfing upon coming home from it. I wrote about the high school reunion before going to it. The result is that I am making up meanings as I go along. Which is the way I live anyway. There is a lot of detailed doubt here." In this collection of eleven pieces, originally issued as a limited hand-printed edition, Maxine Hong Kingston does not attempt to capture Hawai'i but "instead and incidentally" to describe her "piece by piece, and hope that the sum praises her." The essays provide readers with a generous sampling of Kingston's signature: an angle of vision, exquisitely balanced and clear-sighted, that awakens one to a knowledge of things.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824818873
• ISBN13: 9780824818876
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Soothing and nostalgic

Hawai'i One Summer is a slim collection of luminous essays reflecting diversal topics ranging from surfing to house chores. Indeed, this is the least read book by Hong-Kingston. Her prose is clear and evocative. It is very different from the radical Woman Warrior. It evokes a zen quality, like sipping a soulful cup of ginseng tea.

Absolutely Wonderful

HAWAI'I ONE SUMMER is probably Kingston's least-read work, but I think it's the piece which captures this writer's clear and graceful prose style the best. Her essays range from surfing to dishwashing. Who'd ever guess that someone could write a substantial essay on a mundane activity like dishwashing? Well, Maxine Hong Kingston achieved this task. HAWAI'I ONE SUMMER would probably be good to use in an expository writing course.

Kingston knows local lit scene in Hawai'i, and cosmos too.

A memoir of Maxine Hong Kingston's memorable years in Hawai'i, when she went from Viet Nam protests and virtual street existence to pedagogies and mythologies of empowerment that took on national and global impact. This, I find, an insightful, wry, even caustic book on the local literature movements in Hawai'i, always fresh and insightful even when New Yorkerish.