About the Author:
Sanford Zalburg covered Jack Hall and his union as a reporter for The Honolulu Advertiser and continued this close relationship while city editor of The Advertiser from 1959 to 1972. His meticulous research for A Spark is Struck!, first released in 1979, included interviews with more than 200 people and the analysis of thousands of letters, papers and documents in ILWU libraries in Hawaii and San Francisco.
Review:
I have to admit that I had A Spark Is Struck in a pile of books on a chair for a long time before I picked it up. The story behind Hawaii's International Longshore & Warehouse Union? But author Sanford Zalburg immediately reminded me that, when it's well-told, history makes for zesty reading. Take, for example, the 1946 sugar plantation-workers' strike, nearly undone by a white-rice shortage. "Locals 150 and 152 do not want brown [rice] under any circumstances," a union leader frantically reported at the time.
It doesn't hurt that Zalburg's main subject, union leader and labor-movement activist Jack Hall, is so interesting. This is a guy who ran away from home at age 12 and by 17 was a seaman alighting in Honolulu. Hall's audacity helped give workers new strength, but drinking problems plagued him. "Like five blind men touching the elephant, your opinion of him depended on where you touched him," notes Zalburg.
A Spark Is Struck was originally published in 1979, but has been re-released by Watermark Publishing (a sister company to PacificBasin, which owns this magazine). In 2008, it still seems fresh. --Kathryn Drury Wagner, HONOLULU Magazine
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