What are you reading?

"The Shadow of the Sun" by Ryszard Kapuscinski. He is a Polish journalist who spent a lifetime in Africa, and it is his reflection on life in Africa. The other book I'm reading and just about to finish is "The Dark Valley" by Piers Brendon, and it is a panorama of the '30s ... and it poses the question: What were the threads of life in the 1930s in each of these countries that led to the cataclysmic event of the World War II at the end of the decade? And the sort of big hardback book I'm reading is a biography of William Pitt the Younger by William Hague. ...

How did you discover them?

As a child, I lived in West Africa, in Ghana, and in my adult life have spent a lot of time on that continent, and it's always been somewhere for which I have tremendous personal affinity. I tend to read quite a lot of books in and around there, and I tend to read around themes. Africa is one of those themes. History is another theme, and I tend to choose a period in history and read five or six books on that same period. ...

Do these histories spark any ideas about how to steer Hawaiian Airlines and Hawai'i through the difficulties the industry continues to face?

History is the consequence of more than one human inhabiting this planet. It's the interactions of people with one another that create history. ... One of the reasons I enjoy reading about history so much is that there's a lesson for the future in the past, and that applies both at a macro level, between nations and empires and so on, but also at a micro level, just in terms of how people deal with one another.