The excerpts we ran last week from former Gov. Ben Cayetano's book "Ben, A Memoir, From Street Kid to Governor" certainly had local political types talking and others wondering why in the world The Advertiser devoted so much precious space to promoting this particular book.

Cayetano spent a good deal of time researching articles in our library about his life and we tracked the book's progress from time to time, working with his publisher, George Engebretson of Watermark Publishing. The first excerpt appeared in Honolulu Magazine in December 2006 with the expectation that it would be released the following month.

But it would be two years later before Cayetano delivered the final chapter to Watermark. We understood as books take time and according to Engebretson, there are always starts and stops in publishing. Cayetano's memoir was no different.

"I wouldn't say it was writer's block that caused the delay in completion, although there were times when (Cayetano) would feel burned out by the process and put the project aside for a few weeks," Engebretson said. "The biggest factor seemed to be his desire to include as much as possible in his story. The more he wrote, the more he was inspired to add to it. When he started working on his manuscript four years ago, he never dreamed of someday seeing a 560-page book in print."

There was no doubt in my mind that we would be publishing passages from Cayetano's book whenever they were ready. Love him or hate him, Cayetano, a two-term governor, is a big part of Hawai'i's recent political history. Our public affairs columnist, Jerry Burris, helped edit the memoir and promised that the former governor had some provocative insights. The excerpts we ran last week bore witness to the style that earned Cayetano so many loyalists and enemies.

Reading the comments online, it's clear that those who followed his political career to become Hawai'i's first governor of Filipino ancestry still have a lot of aloha for Cayetano. And those who believe he was part of an ineffective one-party system that did little to help the state haven't changed their minds either.

Our role in running the series, including a PDF version of the book's first chapter, was limited to Burris reviewing the book, selecting the chapters and then editing them down to fit our space. We did have some discussion about how many days the excerpts should run and settled on four distinct chapters: his upbringing, first statewide race as lieutenant governor and his two successful races as governor.

We knew from past e-mails and op-ed pieces that Cayetano was a pretty good writer, and the parts I've read are insightful and beneficial to those who care about the political process. Like any good book, it contains morsels of information that take us behind the scenes of some of the top political events of the 1980s and 1990s. Cayetano being Cayetano, he does take swipes at those he doesn't like but in the context of how and where he was brought up, it all makes sense.

Cayetano and The Advertiser didn't always see eye to eye and some of our stories really angered him, but that's all part of the process. The excerpts took up some significant space in The Advertiser, but they were worth printing.

They prompted some discussion and debate about his legacy, and that's always a good thing.