Kaiulani: Crown Princess of Hawaii

by Jean Francis Webb and Nancy Webb

Book Overview

Relying heavily on primary sources and newly translated journals and letters, Sharon Linnea introduces young readers to the most beloved figure in Hawaiian history, and of the America's most... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566472067
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Mutual Publishing
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.3" x 0.5" x 4.5"

Customer Reviews

Ka`iulani -- from a haole perspective

You can tell that this book was written from the haole perspective. In describing Queen Lili`uokalani's return to Honolulu from Washington after losing the political battle for her land and her people, the author speaks of the kanaka maoli greeting her at Washington Place on their knees. She then describes the continuing oli as "witchlike". There are many other insensitivities to the Hawaiian culture throughout the book. They are not meant to be slights, I am sure, but are proffered with the usual complete lack of regard and understanding of Hawaiian traditional ways by one who is not of that ilk. All that aside, it was still very well written and sensitively told. It is, indeed, a sad book and a sad story set iin a sad time. But sadness is what the kanaka maoli have been faced with, and this book honestly shows the many injustices done. It lovingly describes how Ka`iulani was schooled and trained to fit into the haole world, living away from the islands so long for schooling and finishing purposes in western ways. From a young age she was taught by western teachers in western subjects. I wonder if Ka`iulani would have been so beloved of the haoles as well, if she had not been hapa...and beautiful by European/Western standards. Would she have been so beloved if she looked like Princess Ruth Ke`elikölani Keanolani Kanähoahoa? I am haole.

Child of Heaven

"Kaiulani: Crown Princess of Hawai'i" by Nancy Webb and Jean Francis Webb was published in 1962 but has been reprinted more than once because, perhaps, there is always room in our hearts for the story of a princess whose life was as tragic as her nature was beautiful. My first awareness of this princess was acquired as an ignorant tourist strolling back to my hotel along an unfamiliar street after a glorious morning in the water at Waikiki. A short walk from the beach, I passed a tiny park dominated by the statue of a regal looking, young woman. She presides over the pathetic, palm treed remnant of what was once the beautiful garden of her home, Ainahau (meaning a place touched by the cool breeze). In the days when Hawaii was an independent nation, this beautiful girl owned a little, white pony called Fairy and handfed the garden peacocks she regarded as her pets. In 1899, at the age of 23, she passed away there at Ainahau, only a few months after the United States had annexed her country. When she died, the crying of the peacocks woke the town. Today, in place of the lovely house and gardens there is a multistorey hotel, relentless traffic, and the intermittent stench of exhaust fumes. The ugly presence of fast-food litter, callously discarded behind the low wall at the bus stop, offends against the tenderness of the flowers which people still lay in tribute at her feet. Long ago, a dear friend of her childhood, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote to wistfully remind her of the wind which flowed through the palms and the magnificent banyan tree where she used to sit and play. That beautiful tree is no more and the mysterious ebb and flow of the breeze is trapped by modern development and silenced by the machinegun crescendo of jackhammers and roaring motor vehicle engines which accompany the profitable march of progress. In the midst of it all, in that forlorn little park, her statue stands undaunted and the garlands which adorn it whisper of an unforgotten love. Daughter of a Scottish father and her beautiful royal, Hawaiian mother, she was the last hope of a tragically dispossessed and exploited people - her name was Princess Kaiulani. I returned to my comfortable, resort hotel overwhelmed by a haunting and unshakeable sadness which seemed, like Kaiulani herself, very out of place and alien in the frenetic, bustling, tourist trap which is modern-day Waikiki. I had to learn more about her. As a touching but rarely sentimental biography, "Kaiulani: Crown Princess of Hawai'i" will fulfil the need of anyone curious or moved enough to learn about this remarkable and lovely Hawaiian princess. In the process, the reader will gather something of Old Hawaii's struggle to survive in the face of the Machiavellian intrigues of vested big-business interests, and a complex, contradictory American involvement which could be as sympathetic and benign as it was callously insensitive and unjust. American imperialism may or may not have contributed

Kaiulani of Hawaii

This biography of Princess Kaiulani is the closest to an adult version of her life story as you are likely to find. Kaiulani was a compassionate and refined lady of her times. Upon reading this book one is immediately struck by what a tremendous loss her early death was to her people. Had she lived she would have been a tremendously valuable spokesperson for and defender of her people and their way of life. I feel that no one at the time had the power to stop the annexation of the islands by the United States. However, Kaiulani being born of the islands and educated in the west could have gone a long way in easing the transition. The history of Kaiulani and her family is a history worth knowing.