Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to i88j. By Jona-

Jonathan Osorio's book is about the loss of political power and control, not at the shallow level exemplified by the recent Democratic "loss" of the governorship to the Republicans, but one far more disastrous. Dismemberment is the name he puts to it. This powerful metaphor captures the destructive impact on Native Hawaiians when their traditional forms of social relations and ways of life were ruptured by haole (foreign) persons and forces. Osorio's volume joins other recent works that excavate the devastating costs of the incursions by these foreign strangers whose familiarity with Anglo-American law, capitalism, and only one god severely limited their cultural and social imagineries. See O. A. Bushnell, The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawai'i (1993); Tom Coffman, Nation Within: The Story of America's Annexation of Hawai'i (1998); Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea La E Pono Ai? (1992); Sally Merry, ColonizingHawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (2000); Noenoe Silva (forthcoming); Haunani Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonization and Sovereignty in Hawai'i (1993); Houston Wood, Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawai'i (1999). In foreign eyes, Hawai'i was a place and a people lacking the kinds of order—religious, gender, knowledge, economic, and political—that signified civilization, and they set about bringing it into proper alignment. The authorial focus here is on one of their means of setting things right—the implantation of constitutional government in an already weakened form of traditional rule—and the valiant attempt by Hawaiian monarchs and people to make it work for them. In the first several chapters of this book, the author