MARK TWAIN AND HAWAII (519 pp.)Walter Francis FrearPhilip Duschnes ($10).
About noon one March Sunday in 1866, a bushy-haired newspaperman stepped ashore at Honolulu from the steamship Ajax. He had recently been fired from the San Francisco Morning Call for "unsatisfactoriness." Now he was in Hawaii to write a series of articles on the islands for the Sacramento Union at $20 an article. He was 30, unknown by his right name (Samuel Clemens) or the name he used on his dispatches (Mark Twain), and his arrival excited no comment.
Mark Twain spent four months...