I’ve poured my life into surfing, competed on the ASP world tour through my late teens and early twenties, was the editor of several different surfing magazines through the late ‘90s and aughts, and still write about it, way too much in fact. It’s my love, my life, my burden, my machete. Earlier today, in fact, I was out there riding waves. There were dolphins and whales. And bright, soul-enriching sun.
Matt George is a larger-than-life character who immerses in his subjects with great fervor, be it the heroic shark attack survivor Bethany Hamilton, or the seven-time world champion Layne Beachley. I loved reading about the Ho family in Hawaii.
I laughed aloud at Matt’s pithy prose. Would I like to go on a surf-chasing boat trip through Indonesia with Matt George? Very much so.
A soulful collection of nearly four decades of surf writing. In Deep transports readers into the heart of the surfing world’s culture through the eyes and imagination of a master storyteller. George’s personality profiles, perspective essays, and travel accounts achieve a level of frank articulation that, much like the works of Theroux, Krakauer, and Finnegan, reveal as much about the man as it does his subjects. Peak transcendence and quiet reflection, famous beaches and lost islands, competitive triumphs and personal tragedies; In Deep is a compelling montage assembled by both a seasoned observer and fervent participant in the sublime pursuit…
I live in California and write novels based on my grandmother’s stories of our female ancestors. I love tales of everyday women who lived normal lives (according to them) but were quite remarkable to my 21st-century eyes. I wrote The Aloha Spirit about my husband’s grandmother, who was an amazing woman. His family is from Hawaii, and we visit there frequently. Anyone who spends time in the islands experiences the warm welcome of the people, which we know as the aloha spirit. I know Grandma had a difficult life, and I wrote the novel to explore how she might have overcome those difficulties to find her aloha spirit.
Frank Leong is a wealthy shipping industrialist who moves his family from China to Oahu at the turn of the nineteenth century. Frank is murdered, which completely destroys his family. Whispers of an ancient parable haunt the Leongs, of a red string that connects someone to their perfect match but can also punish for mistakes in love. Frank’s pregnant teenage granddaughter, Theresa, is the next target to suffer from her family’s curse. The story is told from multiple points of view in this tragic multigenerational story of secrets and betrayal. My own interest in family history made this novel resonate deeply within me as several generations of women fail in their relationships.
“Diamond Head is an intricate meditation on what is in our control and what is fate—and on whether children must bear the costs of their parents’ mistakes.” —Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Frank Leong, a fabulously wealthy shipping industrialist, moves his family from China to the island of Oahu. But something ancient follows the Leongs to Hawaii, haunting them. The parable of the red string of fate, the cord that binds one intended beloved to her perfect match, also punishes…
Who knew that Jane Stanford, co-founder of Stanford University, was murdered in 1905?
Until recently, exhibits at University museums and family narratives represented the Stanfords as an ideal nuclear unit destroyed by the tragic death of Leland, Jr., at age 15 from typhoid fever. Jane Stanford devoted the rest of her life to honoring her son by creating a great university.
The founding of Stanford University, however, was fraught with conflicts between Jane Stanford, who was obsessed with the spiritual world that she consulted to make academic decisions, and David Starr Jordan, the University’s founding President, who appointed his favorites and sycophants to the faculty.
When Jane Stanford’s death in Hawaii was attributed to strychnine poisoning, President Jordan succeeded in covering up the poisoning by hiring his physician, who wrote an alternative report attributing Jane’s death to “natural causes.”
Richard White examines the historical record, challenges the laudatory narratives that…
In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford co-founded a university to honour their recently deceased young son. After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner's jury, of strychnine poisoning.
With her vast fortune the university's lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in…
Cleo Cooper, a cross-cultural psychology professor, is living the dream on the Big Island of Hawaii. With ocean-dipping weekends, she enjoys her dog, her job, and her boyfriend Ben - until the day she’s on a research vessel and a dead body is caught in the dragline.
The police determine it is murder and set their sights on a gentle former student, Kai. It doesn’t take much urging from Kai’s auntie for Cleo to investigate. But Ben grows distant, and Cleo’s dog grows ill. A couple of accidental deaths later, and someone makes an attempt on her life.
What happened to Cleo’s life in paradise? Can she discover the true killer? Can she stop the killer before the killer stops her?
Paradise is shaken when the body of a young woman is dragged onto a university research vessel during a class outing in Hilo Bay. Cleo Cooper is shaken when she finds her favorite student is on the hook for the murder. Danger lurks on land and sea as Cleo and her friends are enticed to search for the true killer. In between paddling, swimming, and arguing with her boyfriend, Cleo discovers all is not what it seems on the Big Island of Hawaii. But will she figure out the truth before she becomes the next victim?
I live in California and write novels based on my grandmother’s stories of our female ancestors. I love tales of everyday women who lived normal lives (according to them) but were quite remarkable to my 21st-century eyes. I wrote The Aloha Spirit about my husband’s grandmother, who was an amazing woman. His family is from Hawaii, and we visit there frequently. Anyone who spends time in the islands experiences the warm welcome of the people, which we know as the aloha spirit. I know Grandma had a difficult life, and I wrote the novel to explore how she might have overcome those difficulties to find her aloha spirit.
I’m a bit of a fangirl when it comes to Sara Ackerman. I love all of her books about real people in Hawaii during World War II. Her characters are believable and compelling, and the Hawaiian setting is a different aspect of World War II than is usually presented. This book features a close-knit group of women who open a pie stand near a military base. Violet’s husband has disappeared without a word, and she suspects her daughter knows something she isn’t telling. When tension and suspicions rise among neighbors, the women are accused of being spies, and Violet must keep her friends and family safe.
“A close-up look at how wartime chaos affects a tight-knit group of women living on Hawaii in 1944 at the height of Pacific combat.... [Violet’s] journey overcoming her trials and grief through friendship, family, and romance is a story of strength and perseverance.”—Booklist
Violet Iverson and her young daughter, Ella, are piecing their lives together after the disappearance of her husband. As rumors swirl and questions about his loyalties surface, Violet believes Ella knows something. But Ella is stubbornly silent. Something—or someone—has scared her.
With the island overrun by troops training for a secret mission, tension and suspicion between neighbors…
I love history and I love to laugh. That’s why I brand myself as a writer of Victorian Whodunits with a touch of humor. I’ve spent decades learning about 1800s America. I began sharing that knowledge by performing in costume as real women of history. But I couldn’t be on stage all the time so I began writing the books I want to read, books that entertain while sticking to the basic facts of history and giving the flavor of an earlier time. I seek that great marriage of words that brings readers to a new understanding. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Mark Twain is my writing idol. Before Roughing it, I’d never read a book
written during the Civil War era which didn’t take sides and grind axes.
From it, I learned detachment, that personal adventures can live
side-by-side with even the most earth-shattering events. And that
hilarious stories like “Bemis and the Buffalo” are the best antidote for
the chaos and pain of war.
The celebrated author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn mixes fact and fiction in a rousing travelogue that serves as “a portrait of the artist as a young adventurer.”*
In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a newcomer in the Wild West, working as a civil servant, silver prospector, mill worker, and finally a reporter and traveling lecturer. Roughing It is the hilarious record of those early years traveling from Nevada to California to Hawaii, as Twain tried his luck at anything and everything—and usually failed. Twain’s encounters with tarantulas and donkeys, vigilantes…
I became involved in a rigid religious movement as a teen and prepared for the ministry at a fundamentalist college and seminary. I took this ideology to its logical extreme and became a foreign missionary. I know from the inside how such an ideology takes hold of a person and how difficult it is to escape its grasp, especially when family and career are intertwined. Through my own struggle with depression and anxiety, I scoured books to help understand myself and faith development, eventually earning a Ph.D in counseling, emphasizing developmental theory. I know from personal experience what it means to walk away from a way of thinking that has defined much of your life.
T.W. Neal grows up with parents who opt to live on a sparsely populated Hawaiian island, not wearing clothes, surfing, smoking Marijuana, and eating magic mushrooms. The family lives in a van or in housing with few modern amenities and the author attends school on the island only sporadically. Due to her mother’s mental illness and her father’s alcohol abuse, she at times, has to run the household. With difficulty she connects with relatives and a few teachers and begins to reach for a lifeline to break free from the life her parents chose. She wants to go to college and eventually is able to leave the island and pursue a mainstream life. It is astounding that a person growing up in such circumstances would have the desire and determination to forge a different life.
For fans of The Glass Castle and Educated, comes mystery author Toby Neal’s personal story of surviving a wild childhood in paradise.
We never call it homeless. We're just "camping" in the jungle on Kauai...
We live in a place everyone calls paradise. Sure, Kauai’s beautiful, with empty beaches, drip-castle mountains, and perfect surf...but we’ve been "camping" for six months, eating boiled chicken feed for breakfast, and wearing camouflage clothes so no one sees us trespassing in our jungle hideout. The cockroaches leave rainbow colors all over everything from eating the crayons we left outside the tent, and now a…
I’ve been in love with business books since I was a child and I’m also a big fan of great story telling. I didn’t realize until recently that you can have both in one book! Discovering this genre of business books that inspire and delight while passing along new and useful insights was a wonderful surprise for me that I like to share with others. These gripping stories have opened up a whole new world for me and allowed me to learn and apply their lessons much more quickly. It’s simply more fun and easier to remember new wisdom when it’s carried forward in gripping stories.
We meet the protagonist Kai and her daughter Michaela as they navigate some of life’s most difficult moments. They are grieving and lost as Kai struggles to navigate her new life and the dauting prospecting of supporting Michaela all on her own.
Luckily they meet Belle, a wildly successful businesswoman who takes them under her wing as she mentors Kai. Throughout the story, Belle teaches 7 rules that will ensure success for any of us in life and in business.
The book is so compelling that you won’t realize you are learning business principles until you reach the ending with satisfaction and realize that you are smarter and better prepared for having read it. This is another book I simply couldn’t put down!
Kai Frazier is a mother raising her ten year-old daughter, Michaela... alone. Happily married for over ten years, never dreaming she would have to build a new life for the two of them – she now faces difficult and unwanted decisions.
On a beach in Hawaii, she encounters Belle, the lady with the blue hair – a most unusual woman. A friendship develops between the two and Kai’s new mentor guides her as she embarks on her journey into the future.
The characters are lovable, realistic and entertaining. The fiction is at times poignant... at times humorous... and always engaging.…
I’ve traveled the world as a correspondent for the New York Times and the Washington Post but I didn’t understand the importance of travel writing until I spent five years researching the global travel industry. I read countless travel guides and travel books to understand how they shape the way we see the world. That is when I understood that the critical importance of writers who rose above the fray and captured a country, its people, culture, and landscape in travelogues. Those books are transformative, giving depth and insights while popular guides do little more than provide lists of what to do, where to go, and how to follow the crowd. If you truly believe travel gives your life new meaning, then go with these classics.
Unfamiliar Fishes, is one of my favorite contemporary examples of travel writing because it is funny. Vowell turns her travelogue about Hawaii into a full history told with a quirky sense of humor. Nothing escapes her wit – from the greed of the early Americans who took over the island to the tourists like her trying to discover it under the layers of manufactured culture. She ends up loving the place, of course, like all the best travel writers.
From the author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States comes an examination of Hawaii, the place where Manifest Destiny got a sunburn.
Of all the countries the United States invaded or colonized in 1898, Sarah Vowell considers the story of the Americanization of Hawaii to be the most intriguing. From the arrival of the New England missionaries in 1820, who came to Christianize the local heathens, to the coup d'état led by the missionaries' sons in 1893, overthrowing the Hawaiian queen, the events leading up to American annexation feature a cast of beguiling, if often appalling or tragic, characters.…
This book explains why Hawaii is not a US state but rather an illegally
seized foreign country occupied in violation of international law.
My friend Anne Keala Kelly has been an activist and
filmmaker on the front lines of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement for many
years, and her book provides a brilliant,
engaging, and easily accessible overview of the history of Hawaii's invasion and
annexation.
Growing up in a kanaka maoli—Native Hawaiian—family in Hawai’i, I hungered for stories centered around island kids and their authentic lived experiences. I scoured classrooms, libraries, and bookstores looking for stories that reflected my reality, but all I ever found were dusty collections of ancient legends, not books that appealed to my sense of wonder or adventure. It’s the reason I wrote the Niuhi Shark Saga trilogy and why I’m so excited to share this collection with you. These books are everything I always wanted to read as a child growing up in Hawai‘i—and more!
When sixteen-year-old Leilani and her father traveled to O’ahu from Hilo to try a promising but experimental treatment for her epilepsy, they never expected to be stranded in the middle of a worldwide geomagnetic storm. With tsunamis striking randomly, all modern technology broken, and facing food shortages under martial law, Leilani and her father have to fight their way home. Along the way, Leilani discovers that the one thing that makes her different may be the one thing that saves us all. It’s an apocalyptic page-turner centered on Hawaii’s ecology and traditional cultural solutions.
In this fast-paced survival story set in Hawaii, electronics fail worldwide, the islands become completely isolated, and a strange starscape fills the sky. Leilani and her father embark on a nightmare odyssey from Oahu to their home on the Big Island. Leilani’s epilepsy holds a clue to the disaster, if only they can survive as the islands revert to earlier ways. A powerful story enriched by fascinating elements of Hawaiian ecology, culture, and warfare, this captivating and dramatic debut from Austin Aslan is the first of two novels. The author has a master’s degree in tropical conservation biology from the…
