An excellent companion to Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

I'm reading the book Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell (best known for Assassination Vacation or The Partly Cloudy Patriot) and it's an excellent companion to watching this. It's a non scholarly telling of the story of the missionaries upon whom Abner, Jerusha, and their fellow "mikinele" are based (sometimes very closely). Though Vowell is an agnostic she gives an extremely fair depiction of the missionaries- often misguided, sometimes greedy, but extraordinarily brave to make such a horrible voyage and as sincere in their beliefs as they were stern. She gives much more background on the history of Hawaii in the generations before the missionaries arrived: had the missionaries arrived a few years earlier they'd have made no converts and likely been killed but they essentially filled a vacuum created by a seismic shift in the native religions and ways of life caused by several factors, some the result of contact with the haole and some coincidental.
In any case, the movie and Vowell's book compliment each other very well. She compares and contrasts the two extremely traditionalist cultures of Protestant New England and Hawai'i very interestingly. (I'm a fan of the movie and its sequel but not so much of the Michener source which reads more like a textbook than a novel; Michener was never strong on characterizations- the personalities of Abner and Jerusha are at least as much the gift of screenwriters than of the novelist.)