If you've ever read a collection of "true" ghost stories, this is similar, only about the kāhuna. It is a collection of (mostly unsourced) statements purporting to demonstrate that the Hawaiians, like all non-industrialized societies colonized by Europeans, knew more about the world and the universe than Europeans did prior to the 20th century. True? Some of it. Possibly. Good luck identifying which parts, though. It is folklore presented uncritically as anthropology or history, and as long as you take it as such, it's tolerable.

What's intolerable is the writing . . . style, shall we say? The chapter organization is fair, but below that it's crap. Within each chapter the train of thought meanders. Sometimes one paragraph accommodates several ideas, sometimes one idea is discussed in the course of several paragraphs (and the meandering can make that hard to follow). Many, many Hawaiian words are provided, to no purpose that I can tell. If this were a technical work and McBride wanted to be clear what Hawaiian concept he was glossing in English, that would be fine; but it's not a technical work. The writing is what I would expect from a middle-school term paper.

Evidently it was originally intended as a (possibly souvenir?) corrective to an implied popular American conception of the kāhuna as 'witch doctors.' From that perspective it's interesting as an artifact of cultural politics, for which the veracity of specifics isn't the goal: driving out the notion that the Hawaiians were benighted heathens is. ( )