Public Given Free Access to Bestselling Book
The University of Hawai‘i Press and Kamehameha Schools are offering free access to the bestselling book Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust.
Broken Trust chronicles scandal at Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate during the late 1990s, which involved all three branches of Hawai‘i’s government and attracted front-page coverage in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. CBS’s 60 Minutes called it, “the biggest story in Hawai‘i since Pearl Harbor.”
Local and national publications praised Broken Trust; the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association named it Book of the Year; and numerous high schools, colleges, and law schools have used Broken Trust in their courses.
The book’s surviving co-author, Randall Roth, explains in the open-access introduction that he and Judge Samuel P. King wrote Broken Trust to help protect the legacy of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop.
They assigned all royalties to local charities and donated thousands of copies to libraries and high schools. Source documents, legal issues, discussion questions and lesson plans are available at www.BrokenTrustBook.com.
“Judge King would be delighted, as am I, that the current Kamehameha Schools trustees are supporting this open-access edition of Broken Trust,” said Roth.
In Broken Trust’s open-access introduction, the Kamehameha Schools trustees express a desire to recognize and honor members of the Kamehameha Schools ‘ohana who courageously stood up for the trust during the years of controversy. They also express pleasure that Broken Trust will be “openly available to students, today and in the future, so that the lessons learned might continue to make us healthier as an organization and as a community.”
“In Hawai‘i, we tend not to speak up, even when we know that something is wrong. Especially in the Hawaiian community, the common practice has long been to avoid confrontation at almost any cost. This approach does not serve us well in today’s world. We must learn to be good stewards of all that we have been given and this sometimes requires that we take a stand,” said the late Winona Beamer in the open-access introduction of Broken Trust. “The way the Kamehameha ‘ohana rallied and worked together as a family to defend Princess Pauahi’s legacy says much about how to live effectively and righteously in a fast-changing world. It demonstrates the power of informed people unified by moral conviction, and should always be a source of pride and inspiration.”
To access Broken Trust for free, download it via one of these popular online platforms: