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The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences of the Pacific War, by Lin Poyer, Suzanne Falgout, and Laurence Marshall Carucci. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8248-zi68-8, xiii + 493 pages, maps, photographs, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. US$54.
Featuring a rich array of Micronesian voices, anthropologists Lin Poyer, Suzanne Falgout, and Laurence Carucci offer readers a fine historical resource that testifies to the resilience and agency of diverse Islanders in challenging times. Typhoon of War culminates from more than three hundred interviews conducted by the authors in the early 1990s in Chuuk, Kosrae, the Marshall Islands, Pohnpei, and Yap in an oral history project funded primarily by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The use of individual memories and experiences, as well as collective community songs and dances, significantly enriches knowledge of the Second World War from the eloquent and poignant perspectives of those Islanders who directly suffered its consequences, but who are typically unrepresented in the plethora of military histories of Micronesia in World War II. Although the broad spatial focus is on the entire Micronesian region, the authors devote most of their attention to those islands on which they conducted their interviews. Additional secondary-source materials have been incorporated for Palau and the Mariana Islands, and a few references are made to events affecting Kiribati and Nauru.
The authors rightly note that "little is known of the local view of the conflict, largely because Pacific Islander representations of history have been primarily oral and performative, recorded in narrative, dance, drama, and song" (3). This absence of Micronesian voices in the canonical American and Japanese histories does a disservice to those peoples whose lives were so transformed in the years before, during,...