It's easy enough to be condescending toward James Michener, and over the years many reviewers have been exactly that. His long, plodding novels are high on sincerity, low on literary merit. The history he serves in such massive helpings tends to arrive at the table half-baked….

Yet Mr. Michener deserves more respect than he usually gets. Granted that he is not a stylist and that he smothers his stories under layers of historical and ecological trivia, nonetheless he has earned his enormous popularity honorably. Unlike many other authors whose books automatically rise to the upper reaches of the best-seller lists, he does not get there by exploiting the lives of the famous or the notorious; he does not treat sex cynically or pruriently; he does not write trash. His purposes are entirely serious: he wants to instruct, to take his readers through history in an entertaining fashion, to...