Local Interest
Broadway North Beach: The Golden Years, A Saloon Keeper’s Tales
Dick Boyd
Cape Foundation Publications, 327 pp, $29.95
Honolulu resident Dick Boyd has compiled a series of photos and mini-essays detailing his barkeeping days in the San Francisco area of North Beach–the famed bohemian town that was the stomping grounds of such literary luminaries as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and City Lights Bookstore founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as many a jazz musician, artist and celebrity. Among the establishments mentioned are such immortal bars as Tosca, the Condor and Pierre’s.
The book is basically a memoir of Boyd’s days as a barkeep in the legendary district and in addition to mini-essays about the culture, the people and the places, are detailed accounts of the various strippers that haunted the area. (Beware: some of the pictures contain nudity. None< \h>theless there’s still something quaint and nostalgic–not raunchy–about the photos.)
In many ways, it feels like Boyd’s scrapbook rather than a photographic memoir of sorts; the writing has a bloggish, journal-like feel to it. As Boyd himself says in the preface: ‘Keep in mind that much of this book is an oral history, often preserved in an alcoholic hazeÖ’ While it may not be Hawai’i-oriented per say, everybody seems to have a friend or relative in the Bay Area so a little historical perspective can’t hurt. –R.S.
Little League, Big Dreams
Charles Euchner
Sourcebooks, Inc., 304 pgs., $22.95
In August of 2005, a group of kids from West O’ahu became international Little League champions. The game was televised. If you don’t remember it, it’s probably because the story was overshadowed by Hurricane Katrina, which hit the same weekend. But Little League, Big Dreams gives the Hawai’i kids their overdue moment. Digging deep into the sport of baseball, its impact on kids, training strategies, pitching, some extraneous illumination on Christian faith and baseball–the book succeeds the most in its chapters on our young champs. For locals, unless you’re a huge baseball fan with a special passion for Little League, the insight into our heroic team is what focuses the book into a palatable context. It’s the passages that describe coach Layton Aliviado’s single-minded toughness (’Öyou have to be completely on board, you have to do everything my way’) and the stories of our keiki neighbors–craving Spam on the road, returning to O’ahu flanked by autograph seekers, being kissed by girls at school–that provide entertainment. That and four pages of color photos. Definitely skimmable, and definitely worth the price if you know someone who knows someone involved in the big win.–Becky Maltby
The Oracles: My Filipino Grandparents in America
Pati Navalta Poblete
Heyday Books, 122, $13.95
Pati Navalta Poblete was 8 years old, a full-fledged American kid with a difference: She was the only Filipina in her white-bread Livemore, Calif., neighborhood. But she had the freedom of a latchkey kid, which meant she watched too much television, invented imaginary companions and mainly wished for blonde hair and the life portrayed on The Brady Bunch.
Instead, her parents had another child and imported child care. One after the other, Poblete’s grandparents arrived to ‘torture’ her and also to give her the gift of her heritage, albeit one she resisted and only learned to love after ‘the oracles’ returned to the Philippines.
Poblete manages to span chunks of time in a slice of novel. Each grandparent’s arrival heralds a new lesson: ‘Grandma Fausta, discipline; Grandpa Paterna, love; Grandpa Sunday, laughter.’ And in Grandma Patricia, Poblete finds a kindred spirit.
At times, Poblete tries too hard to create drama, foreshadowing family crises that often fail to rise to the calamity foretold. And with grandparents so steeped in cultural food and traditions, Poblete could have spent a sliver more time delving into the senses.
Mainly, though, she gives the reader a well-written glimpse into the emotional dynamics of an immigrant household. –Keala Dickhens
Secondhand World
Katherine Min
Knopf, 288pp, $23
Let’s face it: Teenagers know drama. But in this first novel by Katherine Min, to say the 18-year-old narrator Isadora Myung Hee Sohn has had a bad year is like saying Rumsfeld isn’t quite going to win Mr. Popularity in the 2006 yearbook. The first two pages lay out much of the coming story: Somehow during her journey toward making sense of her Korean-American identity, a fire has left Isa orphaned in a pediatric burn unit. Min takes the reader through the intricate incidents (including drug exploration and romps with an albino boy named Hero) leading up to the traumatic time.
It’s no surprise that the author has already won acclaim as a short story writer. Secondhand World reads like a good short story. It offers seemingly blatant events tickled by more complex themes, likeable characters facing incessant conflict and character motivations leaving you questioning the plot for days. Min has vocalized a preoccupation with the concept of ‘The Other,’ and indeed the concept of obvious differences verses innate understanding reverberates throughout the work.
The always-colorful book is an easy but powerful treat to be completed in five or six hours. It’s an obvious choice for a beach read or book club selection, and it leaves the reader anxious for Min’s future works. –Susan Smyre
Sipping Jetstreams
Taylor Steele, Dustin Humphrey
Sipping Jetstreams Media, 300pp, $69.95
It began with an eye-opening trip to Morocco in March 2004 with surfers Shane Dorian, Dan Malloy and Mike Losness. Somewhere in between hiking across the sand dunes to reach the northwest African shoreline and witnessing a glorious sunset over the snow-capped Atlas Mountains, prolific surf filmmaker Taylor Steele and surf photographer Dustin Humphrey reached a common platform of understanding, one which an American traveling to a country that is 95 percent Muslim in a post-9/11 world has the heightened sensitivity to leverage into a broader philosophy.
‘It’s the idea of going to a place and not just surfing but appreciating the people, the customs, and the diversity of life. Travel and interacting with others improves us all,’ Humphrey, 30, writes in Sipping Jetstreams, the collaborative project between the duo that has produced a visually magnificent, 300-page coffee table book and an equally inspiring 16mm film by the same name. Sipping Jetstreams follows Humphrey and Steele on a series of trips to exotic locales around the globe.
For this project, the spirit of the destination trumps the critical wave maneuver, lending more substance to a type of travel that is often measured by wave count and double-page spreads. Humphrey captures the surfers both in and out of the water: Dave Rastovich throwing a full fan of spray in Japan, Kelly Slater claiming a roomy stand-up barrel in Barbados, Kalani Robb wandering through the Hong Kong market stalls, Ozzie Wright skating through the streets of Havana. The primary photographer for Transworld Surf explains that he varied the film stock to achieve different effects–a cross-processed look for the bright colors in the Caribbean, higher-speed film for a grainier, more classic look in Italy, transparency film to underscore the warm tones in Morocco.
‘His photos breathe on the page. While other photographers shoot with the single dimensions of surfer, wave, and light, Hump fuses the action with as many added elements as he can,’ Australian surf mag Stab editor Sam McIntosh describes in the book.
It’s Humphrey’s portrait shots that are the most compelling: a schoolgirl draped over the handlebars of her bicycle in Japan, a nun peering out a window in Italy. ‘When you see his portrait work,’ Steele says, ‘you feel like you are swimming in the subject’s soul.’
-Catharine Lo
Honolulu Weekly Recommends
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment
Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, Editors W. W.
Norton & Company, 208 pages, $29.95
Dorothea Lange’s photos of the Great Depression put a face to the economic misery of those years: a bone-weary mother, a gaunt man seeking work. After Pearl Harbor, another American tragedy played across the national stage: The U. S. government divested thousands of Japanese families of their property and herded them into relocation centers. Lange was there to document their heartbreak and their courage, but the government that had hired her to show how happy its prisoners were, impounded her photographs until the war’s end. Since then, they have not received much attention. Editors Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro have selected more than a hundred of these photos and have included Lange’s own captions. Two essays provide a framework for the art and for the period: Gordon’s on Lange’s life and artistic mission, Okihiro’s on the personal stories of the mainland detainees. Most interesting for us, Okihiro also recounts the similar travails of Hawai’i’s Japanese residents during the war. For those who saw the Honolulu Academy of Arts exposition of Ansel Adam’s Manzanar photos, this book will serve as an intriguing counterpoint. Adam’s mission was to show how human and American the internees were in their camp life; Lange courageously shows how dehumanizing were the policies that put them there.
-S.W.
