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Island of Angels: The Growth of the Church on Kosrae / Kapkapak lun Church fin acn Kosrae, 1852-2002, by Elden M Buck. Honolulu: Watermark Publishing, 2005. ISBN 0-9753740-6-0; 592 pages, tables, figures, maps, photographs, appendixes, in English with Kosraean summary translations of each chapter, notes, bibliography, index. US$24.95.
Island of Angels recounts the history of the Christian church on the Micronesian island of Kosrae from the 1852 arrival of the first Congregational missionary couple. Author Elden Buck himself served as a missionary on Kosrae from 1958 to 1962. His wife, Mary Alice Hanlin Buck, had earlier been a missionary on the island and contributed to the new translation of the Kosraean Bible, completed in 2002. Buck's documentary research and firsthand Kosrae experience produced a monograph of twenty chapters, each exhaustively covering an era in the history of the island's mission and independent church.
The book begins with a discussion of pre-Christian life. It goes on to recount the experiences of Benjamin and Lydia Snow, the first missionaries. Buck gives special attention to the history of the boarding school at Wot ("Mwot"), where in 1879 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions provided missionaries to educate and train Kiribatese and Marshallese children. He describes the work of the Baldwin sisters (Elizabeth and Jane) at Wot between 1911 and 1940 in exhaustive detail, including their first translation of the entire Bible into Kosraean in 1926. He leads readers through the Japanese and American periods, concentrating on...