"Hawaii’s Scenic Roads: Paving the Way for Tourism in the Islands"
Dawn Duensing
University of Hawaii Press, $42

In her introduction to her new book on the development and significance — beyond providing motorists with pretty views — of Hawaii’s scenic roads, Dawn Duensing quotes an engineer, David Kittelson, who said in 1971, "Transportation as a public and commercial enterprise has received some scrutiny but scarcely in proportion to the (Hawaiian) islands’ dependence on it." Duensing’s book helps to remedy this oversight.

As both an engaging read and a prime example of scholarship, "Hawaii’s Scenic Roads: Paving the Way for Tourism in the Islands" will find avid readers among historians, engineers, urban planners and makers of public policy, particularly with regard to transportation. It will also appeal to those many local residents with a persistent desire to understand how pre-World War II Hawaii evolved into the American state it is today.

Providing a wealth of information on the political, economic and social conditions of Hawaii from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, Duensing focuses on the development of roads, devoting chapters to Oahu’s Nuuanu Pali Road, Maui’s Hana Belt Road and the two major National Park Service roads on Maui and the Big Island. She states that she hopes her book "illuminates how the commercial elite … concentrated on road projects, especially scenic byways, to westernize and economically develop Hawaii. … These thoroughfares came at the expense of makaainana (commoners), who toiled to build the highways, but had little voice in the matters."

Much of the early part of the book is devoted to a detailed account of Hawaii’s political conditions before the war, and explains how the Hawaii Bill of Rights, passed by Congress in 1924, initiated a long process of applying for and obtaining federal aid for road projects.

"Road projects played a crucial role in integrating the Territory of Hawaii into federal revenue-sharing programs and the concept of an American nation," she writes. This "financial dependence pushed Hawaii further along on its slow road toward political equality, which was eventually granted with statehood in 1959."

The scholarship required to turn Duensing’s graduate school work into "Hawaii’s Scenic Roads" must have been daunting, and occasionally she gets bogged down in trying to share her research. Also, minor typographical errors as well as mistakes in spelling ("principal" is spelled as "principle" throughout) and grammar (dangling and misplaced modifiers) sometimes mar the text. However, these are mere quibbles compared with the writer’s triumph in vividly resurrecting a Hawaii past.

Interestingly, the National Park Service, which planned and built some of the roads and structures she focuses on, emerges as a hero, trying to protect natural areas while limiting public access to them.

In her epilogue, Duensing discusses the "Hawaiian sense of place" and the interplay between preserving that sense and building roads. She cites island roads that are associated with "cultural landscapes that help define and represent their community’s identity," adding, "These roads demonstrate that citizens value rural, scenic and historic byways as an important part of their heritage and a means to safeguard their lifestyle."

Her book is certainly worthy of reflection as we drive on Hawaii roads both scenic and not.