Now that Thanksgiving is pau and you are working on your Christmas list, I have the right gift for your literate husband, wife, uncle, aunt, friend, boss, cleaning woman, handyman or minister.

A book has just come out called "Lost Generations: A Boy, A School, A Princess" by J. Arthur Rath that gives you all the dirt that's fit to print about the fall of the Bishop Estate trustees, such as Lokelani Lindsey's "pooper scooper" episode.

Lindsey had been invited to represent Maui as a pa'u rider in the Aloha Week parade. She needed somebody to clean up after her horse so she demanded that Kamehameha students volunteer.

"Years of educational experience should have made her aware of how humiliating the public nature of this task would be to teenagers," writes Rath. "No one volunteered. She insisted the school provide this service, so members of a music appreciation club became 'pooper scoopers.' Instead of paying the club herself, she ordered the estate to write a check for $100."

The last half of the book contains many more inside revelations about how the powerful, secretive Bishop Estate back-scratching club came unraveled. To read today what they got away with then seems incredible. But, as Rath explains, the Bishop Estate was so sacrosanct that nobody dared criticize until Nona Beamer started the ball rolling.

One marvelous service this book performs is to document the contribution of former trustee Oswald "Oz" Stender. He's the real hero in this story, the person who blew the whistle to save the estate. Stender provided Rath, a fellow student at Kamehameha, with the details that make the last half of the book hard to put down.

The first half of the book is a puzzle. Rath calls his style of presentation "talk story," and that's probably the best way to describe it. The story jumps around, from his painful childhood to Bernice Pauahi Bishop to the overthrow of the monarchy to Chinatown and Ching Ming.

This book has Hawaiian written all over it. Sometimes the sensitivity and perception of the writing reminds me of John Dominis Holt. In other places, Rath drops names in the prolific style of Sammy Amalu. Then again, his short history of Hawai'i reads like a news release for one of the self-proclaimed Hawaiian nations. In this book, Hawaiians are always heroes and, somehow, haoles turn out to be villains.

In the book, Rath finds irony in, of all things, the terms applied to sugar. He points out that raw sugar is brown, like Hawaiians, while refined sugar is called white like haoles. That association had never entered my mind before.

In any event, here's a book well worth reading and giving for Christmas.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.