Reading Malcolmson's book is a test to anyone's patience. His general lament is that America lacks a shared history, a history that can be used to form a truly collective American identity. I do not fault him for attempting to trace our shared histories, but his book fails at this. Instead, it is a shallow attempt to reposition the white male narrative in a multicultural history that lacks a critical analysis of how concepts of "race" and inequality have collided to shape a separate America.

Any undergraduate social science or history student would be appalled at Malcolmson's treatment of race and conflict in this book. Little context or evidence is given to justify his numerous claims while concepts are not qualified at all. This is definitely not a book to use for instruction. I read this book as part of a graduate seminar at UC Berkeley and we spent most of the class time criticizing it.

Lastly, a third of the book centers on his life growing up in Oakland. Believe me, it's the most completely self-absorbed irrelevant biography I have ever seen. It reads as a weak attempt at rearticulating a "Can't we just get along" position.

Malcomson emphasizes the idea that the new USA needed a racial identity - "to the extent that Americans wanted a national identity as a people, rather than human beings that happened to be in America, that identity almost had to be racial.... 'American' identity would be a white identity."
While this is true in large part, it largely ignores the huge impact of the colonies' religious identity (which had driven the founding of several colonies) by curtly stating the unattributed fact that "in 1790 only about one in ten white American was a member of a formal church." Whatever relationship actual membership in a "formal church" may have to do with American's personal beliefs, there is ample evidence that a common core of publicly-expressed religious beliefs formed the basis of the "American" character in 1790.
Malcomson likewise downplays the cohesive unity brought about by the struggle against Britain, joint membership in a new country, and the adherence to the ideals of the Declaration. This emphasis on the preeminent racial nature of "American" identity is somewhat at odds with his other theme that "being white meant, above all, not being black."
While the book is subtitled "The American Misadventures of Race," the book could benefit from some discussion about the role of race in other civilizations and countries. What, in other countries, is similar to, or different from, the US experience?
While Malcomson does a good job in analyzing popular culture's take on race in many cases, this could improve. There's no mention of the effect of Defoe's 1719 _Robinson Crusoe_ - the first English novel, and full of the racial assumptions of the time (during 28 years on the island pondering why God abandoned him, Crusoe never considers it could be because of his involvement in the slave trade; nor does Crusoe give second thought to his assumption that Friday will be his servant after leaving the island). D.W. Griffith's 1915 "Birth of a Nation" is barely mentioned.
Malcomson's attitude toward religion is inconsistent. At one point, he tries to argue that religion did not support slavery, writing that pro-slavery advocates "desperately ransacked the Bible to find comfort for slaveholders ... [with] harried thumbings of the Bible." Yet it isn't too hard to find the Bible's tacit approval of slavery, its general comments on separation of peoples, and even direct commands such as "Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters." Nor does Malcomson mention the approval that many churches gave to slavery, and the typical segregation practiced by churches, which certainly lent legitimacy to feelings of white superiority. Billy Graham astonished some church members when he refused to allow segregated seating in his crusades after 1954: in some areas, formalized church segregation continued through the 1960's.
Yet, ignoring the church's segregation through the 1960's, Malcomson suddenly decides the church is segregated in the 1970's. He writes, "When, as a teenager, I left Oakland, I also left the church.... I could not choose to be in a white church. That would be like choosing a white school (or a white town).... [In the black church,] the music is undeniably better, there's more to eat at socials, and grief is not treated as a ... character flaw. Where the white church is a lake, the black church is an ocean."
First, where is the discussion about _why_ some churches are "white" ?? There are many reasons besides intended segregation that a church may wind up to be predominately white. Second, what right does Malcomson have to generalize from his own experience to the idea that the "black" church is everywhere superior to the "white" church?
Why does Malcomson think that "when I was a teenager" is a date every reader should recognize? (By reading other passages, Malcomson was apparently a teenager in the 1970's.) In another passage, Malcomson strangely dates an event by the year when "Grandma was closing in on death."
Malcomson frequently picks on the negative: he spends seven pages describing the 1849 California constitutional convention debates on whether to admit free blacks to California, yet he does not give the end vote and its margin, nor any relevant language of the California constitution.
The book, published in 2000, essentially ends its narration of American racial history in the mid 1970's, with the observation that whites then tried to move away from their racial past, as other races moved toward theirs.
One major current issue on race in America is "reverse discrimination." Malcomson doesn't even mention cases such as Baake. Is it right for blacks to receive benefits based on race? Malcomson's only comment, somewhat on point, is that "races in America have functioned so much as families do, and once you are in the family you receive your part of the inheritance, and the American past becomes your past."
Earlier Malcomson discusses the attempt of abolitionists in the 1840's to keep blacks from forming black groups or holding black conventions, on the principle of equality. "The beyond-race principle lacked a historical element. Perhaps that is in the nature of a principle. But in the case of race in America, it could have strange consequences, because race, being itself historical, resists ahistorical explanation."
Where are the author's thoughts on the solution to our racial problems? How long must the correction of our "family" problem continue? One would hope that someone who had done so much research would have some thoughts, but they're not presented.
This is a worthwhile book to read, because it will make you think. Yet it has a lot of gaps in it, is overly long in many sections, and its stream-of-consciousness organization (as Salon states) is "unorthodox if not downright infuriating."

Malcomson provides a wealth of historical, detailed proof of the European, Renaissance-period origins of "race." Additionally, from a uniquely American perspective, he shows how destructive this concept has been for both "white" people and "non-white" peoples, alike. This book is necessarily somewhat dry, because the concept of race lies so deep within our sub-conscious thinking that cursory analyses and descriptions would come off as either mythological or hysterical -- and therefore would convince no one of their truth.

Right from the start Westerners fell in love with the South Seas, or maybe it was the willing women, or maybe it was because after being cooped up on small ships for months on end with a bunch of guys, a balmy island of coconut palms, plentiful food, AND women was just too close to Paradise. In any case, the "romance of the Islands" took root and has flourished for a couple centuries. Like any romance, it may not be that close to reality. Perhaps the Edward Said of the South Seas has yet to raise his (or her) voice, but if ever a region of the world was "constructed" by travel writers, governors, film makers, airlines and shipping firms, tourist bureaus, and stamp designers, it is the islands of the South Pacific. Scott Malcolmson, a journalist from the USA, travelled around the region in the late 1980s with the specific aim of ignoring the popular, romantic myths and investigating the political facts. Predictably, what he found was not all that edifying. Skullduggery, chicanery, neocolonialism, (or in the case of the French, out and out colonialism) racism, environmental destruction, and incompetence in varying measures seemed to rule the roost. What a surprise !

Malcolmson doesn't try to give a comprehensive tour of all the varied island nations of Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, but sticks only to nine of them, of which four are the former American territories of Palau, Guam, Saipan, and the Marshall Islands. Being American perhaps helped him there; these are the best sections of the book where he discusses military and commercial exploitation of the four places. America has shaped these islands to suit its own short range purposes, then left them to twist slowly in the wind, nuclear contamination mixed with junk food and unviable lifestyles. The section on Kiribati is the weakest in the book and perhaps could have been left out. In the other chapters, on Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia, we get well-written reportage on the state of politics, the main issues, and a certain political mood.

What I liked about TUTURANI is that it avoids all romanticism, treats people in a down-to-earth manner, neither glorifying or denigrating them. In short, the author succeeds in reaching his goal. Yet, something is missing. This is certainly one of that genre of books by expert journalists who visit unfamiliar territory where their skills in finding stories and getting interviews cannot quite compensate for lack of deeper knowledge of the place. In short, I felt that TUTURANI is slightly superficial, even if at the same time sincere and honest. The reader does not get any historical or cultural sense of place, though basic details are supplied. The single sketchy map and the bibliography (at least he did supply one) also reflect my criticism. While the book is one of the few of its kind---most serious books on the South Pacific being in History or Anthropology---it might also be seen as a modern "Inside the South Pacific", John Gunther style. If that pleases you, you may enjoy TUTURANI, but it could also leave you unfulfilled. I think Robert Trumbull's "Tin Roofs and Palm Trees" was a better book, but that came out in 1977 and so is quite out of date. If you want a serious journalistic view of the region in the late '80s, this is it.