Best oceania history books according to redditors
We found 50 Reddit comments discussing the best oceania history books. We ranked the 24 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 50 Reddit comments discussing the best oceania history books. We ranked the 24 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
There is no solid evidence on the existence of 'matriarchal societies'.
If you are thinking of the data reported by Margaret Mead, that has turned out to be a false.
Read Killing Keiko its an amazing read for anyone who thinks that "setting all the whales free" is a simple option. A must read for anyone who cares about whales under human care. Everyone I know in the marine mammal community has a copy.
The only source for this seems to be this book. That could be just some sailor's yarn, considering discipline on british ships was usually very tight and sailors weren't so stupid to damage the ship they were supposed to travel home on.
It's an interesting question. It reminded me of a book I bought at a Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine (USA).
https://www.amazon.com/Shipyard-Maine-Percy-Small-Schooners/dp/0884482731/
I think the bookstores of Maritime Museums are a really good place to start. I found this after looking at the Bath Museum's store page:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CNQ2W5A/
But there a ton of maritime museums out there. I have visited a bunch. Almost all had history books focused on local maritime subjects.
I have to completely agree. The Laffey and the Cushing charging the Hiei has to go down as one of the most incredible naval actions of the war.
The wreck was located in 1992 by Bob Ballard and his team when they set out to find the lost ships of Ironbottom Sound. Some quality images of the Laffey, along with some of the other located wrecks can be found in this book, documenting Ballard's expedition. Extremely highly recommended. I was looking at my newly-arrived copy while writing the history earlier.
They don't have anything to do with Canadian politics specifically but two very interesting books that I just finished.
Diamond's new book has opened my eyes on the value which traditional societies can provide to modern one's today. A really thought provoking book. Fukuyama is one of my most trusted authors on topics including sociology and historical development, the book focuses on political institutions and their development specifically through China and the Middle East (because that was where it all started).
As /u/l33t_sas suggested, the Pacific world was very extensively connected in the pre-contact and early contact eras. There's been a wellspring of work on that topic in the wake of Epeli Hau'ofa's essay "Our Sea of Islands", which was published in 1993. Hau'ofa argues that the image of Pacific islands as small, remote, and isolated is one created and fostered by colonialism, and that Pacific islands are more properly understood as part of a large Pacific world and deeply interconnected.
There have been some wonderful theoretically-oriented pieces like Joakim Peter's "Chuukese travelers and the idea of horizon," which seeks to connect Islander's travel in the past with contemporary movement and to examine the meaning of that movement. Geographers like Lola Bautista have done more on-the-ground fieldwork to investigate the ways in which islanders continue to travel, the pathways through which they move, the relationship between contemporary and historical travel, and the meaning of that travel.
But historians have been involved in this work also. Kealani Cook just completed a dissertation at the University of Michigan called "Kahiki: Native Hawaiian Relationships With Other Pacific Islanders, 1850-1915" which, as you might imagine, seeks to connect Hawai'i with a broader Pacific world. Alice Somerville's Once Were Pacific does something a bit similar, although it's more focused on contemporary relationships among Maori and other Pacific Islanders (in New Zealand).
Of course there's also the literature on navigation, within which I particularly like Paul D'Arcy's People of the Sea. If you're interested in the mechanics of navigation, that's not a bad place to go -- and it paints a pretty legible picture of which islands would have been more connected and for what reasons. For example, within Micronesia, high volcanic islands like Pohnpei or Kosrae would have had somewhat less motivation to foster cultures of long-distance voyaging because those islands tended to be fertile enough to provide residents with anything they needed. The same is true for Hawai'i. Voyaging existed in all three of those places, and very long distance voyages certainly took place from time to time, but most trips tended to be short or medium range. In the Central Caroline Islands, however, since most people lived on low coral atolls that were more susceptible to droughts or storms, voyaging represented an insurance policy of sorts -- so Central Carolinians paid a tribute to a traditional leader on the high island of Yap to have an extra layer of protection in times of crisis. A similar situation obtained in the Marshall Islands, except that there was no central high island. Instead, Marshallese atolls were deeply connected with one another -- to the extent that many Marshallese claimed (and claim) multiple atolls as their homeland.
I don't meant to imply that voyaging is all in the past. It isn't, and many islands maintain a thriving culture of navigation. But it's also true that Pacific Islander interconnectedness and mutual dependency never ended. Pathways of connection were interrupted or reshaped by colonialism and the boundaries it erected in the ocean, but as Hau'ofa argued, Islanders have long "made nonsense" of those boundaries by continuing to move across them. Pacific Island voyaging has been transmuted into other forms, in other words.
Any book by Mary Roach- her books are hilarious, random, and informative. I like Jon Krakauer's, Sarah Vowell's, and Bill Bryson's books as well.
Some of my favorites that I can think of offhand (as another poster mentioned, I loved Devil in the White City)
No Picnic on Mount Kenya
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Collapse
The Closing of the Western Mind
What is the What
A Long Way Gone
Alliance of Enemies
The Lucifer Effect
The World Without Us
What the Dog Saw
The God Delusion (you'd probably enjoy Richard Dawkins' other books as well if you like science)
One Down, One Dead
Lust for Life
Lost in Shangri-La
Endurance
True Story
Havana Nocturne
I know! I'm sorry. Lol. I picked up A Night to Remember and then stopped looking!
Talofa lava!
In terms of books that might give an earlier insight into Samoan culture (as it were observed by a German) this volume (there are a pair I think) is a good encyclopedic resource of sorts. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001M29JX4/ref=mp_s_a_1_7?qid=1463652911&sr=8-7&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=kramer+history+of+samoa&dpPl=1&dpID=517TDOxllbL&ref=plSrch
In that case, if you want to explore the subject further, the books of James Churchward I mentioned earlier are a good place to start.
This link will tell you a bit about him. You can find a Kindle edition of his first book about Lemurea (which he called 'Mu'—hence the use of the word by the pop group video you posted a link to) on Amazon: The Lost Continent of Mu. His other books are still available in various editions, new and second-hand.
I hope that's of help?
You might find some inspiration in open world car racing games. Fuel is the first game that comes to mind, but also the open world side of the Burnout games. The gameplay is literally travel; drive from A to B the fastest you can. And the world is open and various enough to make exploration interesting. It's not exactly what you're talking about, but it's related.
I love the idea of using Polynesian navigation as a jumping off point. The book Vaka Moana has a lot of useful source detail. Also have to work stick charts in the visual presentation somehow.
My Top 3:
First, for a proper, basic understanding of what makes people happy on the most fundamental level, and what social structures support that best, I think anthropology is a good place to start. I recommend The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond, which is an overview of modern primitive societies suggesting the social structures humans evolved. The idea is that anything contrary to the evolved structure risks being contrary to the human organism itself, and thus can be a cause of stress. Specifically, daily life in "Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic" (WEIRD) societies is in fact an aberration compared to how we evolved to live.
Obviously, any return to primitivism would be absurd, so next you would want to look into sociology, political science, psychology, and any number of other sciences to figure out how to apply just the benefits of primitive social structures in a modern, progressive, open society manner that guarantees human rights and diversity.
Personally, I think that the way humans will organize themselves in the future, assuming we even survive the next few centuries, will be a global network of massively distributed communities, each small in population and run via direct democracy, which is reminiscent of tribal social structures, but with all the benefits of the modern Internet, technology, medicine, science, etc.
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If you enjoyed it, may I recommend Jared Diamond's The World Before Yesterday. He's an author and anthropologist who spent time with many aboriginal people (in particular in Papua New Guinea). Note, it's not exactly a breezy reading; it can feel like a college textbook sometimes.
I think the video was interesting, and I thought many of their insights were spot-on. It was a good reminder that people who are from primitive cultures are not necessarily culturally or intellectually inferior. However, it's tempting to swing the other way and fall into the believe of the "noble savage." That's where I thought Diamond's book was so fascinating. Things that we do that horrify them (Diamond's book talks about how the West treats our elderly), there are things that other cultures do that would horrify us (he gives an example of how one tribe views self-reliance and children that was plain scary).
Try this one and you have a little left over for something else.
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Shangri-Survival-Adventure-Incredible/dp/0061988340/ref=amb_link_356763542_3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-6&pf_rd_r=1PH8N1KYP59FYZXACN4Q&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1313957462&pf_rd_i=283155
> If you ever get a chance to look at the book "Buevers du Kava" (drinkers of kava) definitely flip through it (even if you don't read French
It's a bit pricey for a book I can't read so I'm really hoping they put out an English version at some point.
I recently took a cross country flight and was reading "The Lost Continent Of Mu" by James Churchward. Fascinating book, but I was particularly struck by how he allowed his own bias into his descriptions of the perfect society of Mu.
There are many things he made clear he didn't know, but he was sure to (multiple times) let the reader know that among this great society of equals, the WHITE MEN were the rulers.
Read that a last sentence a few times. And now you know how 'history' works. He's discussing a society that generated the sum total of ancient art and mythology by interpreting dead languages from literal stone tablets... but he still couldn't imagine a society where men ruled as true equals.
All from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Bougainville-before-conflict-Anthony-Regan/dp/1921934239
https://www.amazon.com/Light-Intervention-Lessons-Bougainville-Perspectives/dp/1601270615
https://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Diary-Bougainville-Crisis-Part/dp/1475254687
https://www.amazon.com/Sandline-affair-Politics-Mercenaries-Bougainville/dp/0733307019
https://www.amazon.com.au/Unorthodox-Soldier-Peace-Sandline-Affair/dp/184018180X
And unrelated to Bougainville, but a dramatized movies about Sandline’s involvement in a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea is Coup!
Hey, I was thinking about this a couple of days ago. You might like Goose Green. It is non-fiction, but it was really well-written. The images the author describes of the 2 Paras running across muddy fields as mortars ploop into the muck around them and fail to explode is a pretty crazy one.
Another good one if you like that is The Bear Went Over The Mountain. It's about Russian tactics in Afghanistan, covering a lot of the small battles they fought.
I'm halfway through The Sea & Civilization right now. The scope is amazing and it's a scrumptious read. http://www.amazon.com/The-Sea-Civilization-Maritime-History/dp/140004409X
Evolutionary there's advantage in exterminating males (including male children) and abduct and rape the females during wars.
See e.g. http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional/dp/0670024813 for a description of an environment we've evolved to fit into.