Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti

by Anne Salmond University of California Press, 2009. Aphrodite’s Island is a new account of the European discovery of Tahiti, the Pacific island of mythic status that has figured so powerfully in European imaginings about sexuality, the exotic, and the nobility or bestiality of “savages.” In this book, Anne Salmond takes readers to the center [...]

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Island World: A History of Hawai‘i and the United States

By Gary Y. Okihiro University of California Press, 2008 In Island World, Gary Y. Okihiro reconsiders the traditional idea that the United States acts upon and dominates Hawai‘i without the Islands in turn acting upon the mainland U.S. Using geology, folklore, music, cultural commentary, and history, Okihiro reveals Hawaiians fighting in the Civil War, sailing [...]

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No Bottom

    By Mike Newell Xoxox Press, 2008 Working on seasonal wildfires in the 1970’s and 1980’s across Alaskan tundra and mountain ranges, wildland firefighter Mike Newell developed a deep appreciation for an arctic and subarctic landscape whose scale dwarfs all human effort. Returning each fire season, Newell found himself increasingly transfixed by the primal [...]

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Speaking Havoc: Social Suffering & South Asian Narratives

By Ramu Nagappan.  University of Washington Press, 2005. Who has the right to speak about trauma? As cultural products, narratives of social suffering paradoxically release us from responsibility while demanding that we examine our own connectedness to the circumstances that produce suffering. As a result, the text’s act of “speaking havoc” rebounds in unsettling ways. [...]

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Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation

By Jonathan Lear Harvard University Press, 2006. Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy, delves into what he calls the ‘blind spot’ of any culture: the inability to conceive of its own devastation. He molds his thoughts around a poignant historical model, the decimated nation of Crow Indians in the early decades of the [...]

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Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time

By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin Viking Penguin, 2007. Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse’s unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of [...]

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Paradigm Wars: Indigenous People’s Resistance to Globaliztion

By Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz Sierra Club Books, 2006. “No communities of people on this earth have been more negatively impacted by the current global economic system than the world’s remaining 350 million indigenous peoples. And no peoples are so strenuously and, lately, successfully resisting these invasions and inroads.”— from the introduction by Jerry [...]

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