For some time Paul Lyons has been producing insightful work on US relations with the South Pacific in their literary, cultural and imperial contexts. This book therefore acts both as a summation of Lyons's recent contributions to the field and as a useful starting point for scholars seeking a well-researched and authoritative examination of debates relating to the growth of US imperialism via its expansion – both geopolitical and imaginative – into the Pacific region. While sharing the interests that “New Americanist” scholars like Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease have had in establishing the contours of US imperial history and ideology, Lyons advances this work by arguing for more sustained attention to what he calls American Pacificism: an ongoing commercial, military, scientific, psychic and creative investment in the Pacific region. American Pacificism, Lyons argues, is a crucial area of enquiry that has tended to fall between the very fields that should have embraced it: American (US) studies and Pacific studies. In response, Lyons offers a necessary analysis of US–Pacific entanglements that does not merely perpetuate an image of US power exercised over islands variously characterized as “remote,” “innocent” or “insignificant,” but outlines the complex web of relations that strongly influenced US conceptions of self and national identity over two centuries. At the same time, Lyons addresses the crucial issue of dialogue and exchange, eager to sidestep the pitfalls of perpetuating the ethnographic and analytical circle of “us talking to us about them.” American Pacificism is ambitious in scope and its textual analyses are concise, but never reductive. Lyons teases out the distinctiveness of the US engagement with Oceania, showing the ways these relations have been both linked to, and distinguishable from, “the cluster of imaginative needs and repressions” that emerged around, for example, American Indians and African Americans. Of the key texts examined, some are subtly, and others overtly, engaged with issues of US expansionism, from Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Melville's Pacific novels, Cooper's Mark Reef and Wilkes's Narrative of the U.S. Exploring Expedition; to the “cannibal tours” of Charles Warren Stoddard, Jack London and Frederick O'Brien; finally to the more recent work of Paul Theroux, James Michener, Albert Wendt, Sia Figiel and Alani Apio.