The paperback edition of The Colony has prompted a fresh outpouring of reader letters. Please keep them coming. (And should you need some priming, a sampling is posted in the usual spot.)

I’ve been remiss in my blogging. (Yet again.) Thus this shorthand update of pleasant book-related news:
1) The paperback of The Colony was released about a month ago.
2) The paperback was a BookSense pick of the month, as was the hardcover.
3) The paperback has cracked the bestseller list, as did the hardcover. Thanks to everyone who bought one. (Now go buy another.)
4) The Colony is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. My competition is as follows:

• Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)
• Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin Press)
• Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking)
• John Tayman, The Colony (Lisa Drew / Scribner)
• Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)

If I were a betting man, I’d put money on Lawrence Wright. But if you wish to witness my comeuppance in person — or just enjoy the Times Festival of Books, you can purchase tickets here. (The awards are on the evening of Friday, April 27th, followed, that Saturday and Sunday, by the Festival. 130,000 attendees. 400 authors, including me. Six stages. Autographs! Sun! Sand! Snacks! Check it out!)

The Best Books of the Year round-ups are hitting the newstands, and — happily — many of these include The Colony. Last week it was the Chicago Tribune and the Rocky Mountain News. As the latter is one of my hometown papers (the Denver Post being the other), it was especially nice to read their tout:

Rivaling fiction in its twists and turns, Tayman tells the story of Hawaii’s Molokai leper colony, where those with leprosy (or suspected of the disease) had been rounded up at gunpoint and dumped to face a horrific existence. Tayman details unspeakable cruelty but also incomprehensible altruism.

Also nice was learning that a consortium of the country’s leading independent bookstores chose the paperback edition of The Colony as a January 2007 Book Sense Pick. (The hardcover edition, by the way, was the #1 Book Sense pick for January 2006.) It’s another unexpected honor, and guarantees that the paperback will get plenty of shelf space and prominence in stores. Here’s the blurb that accompanies the announcement:

“The Colony is an adept and absorbing history of the most notorious island in the Hawaiian chain, Molokai, where lepers were forcibly exiled. The humanity and suffering of Molokai’s lepers comes across as clearly as a scream across the ages.” — Jessica Friedlander, Bay Books, Monterey, CA

With the publication date for the paperback edition of The Colony approaching, it’s a good time to share some news about several of the more prominent characters in the book.

On September 28, at 12:40 a.m., Olivia Breitha passed away. She died at the Kalaupapa care home, only a few hundred yards from the spot at which she first set foot in the settlement, 69 years earlier. Olivia was 90 years old. She was buried the afternoon following her death, in a grave dug alongside that of her late husband, John.

I spent a good deal of time with Olivia during the reporting of The Colony. One morning in her cottage, I asked Olivia what confinement had meant to her. At various times she gave different responses to this question, or similar questions, and the replies seemed to vary depending on who was doing the asking and her mood. On this day, however, she answered, “As strange as this may sound, it didn’t bother me. When you’re in a locked place and you can’t run away, what are you going to do? The key is not yours to open doors. Plus I got to know God better than if I hadn’t come here. I don’t know what I would have been if that had not happened. I probably would have been a ruffian or something. So getting to know God was good thing. You know that you can take what comes to you because you know somebody else is with you. It helps me from being angry.” The response was classic Olivia: heartfelt, wry, and with an astounding lack of bitterness. She had a wonderful ability to find the smallest slivers of silver within life’s darkest clouds.

In her powerful memoir, Olivia had observed:

“We all make the best of our lives here. This is it for us. This is the end of our fight. You know how it is. You fight against the isolation. . . . You fight yourself, the disease, the other patients, the board of health. Then finally, you give up, and find yourself.”

Another resident of the Kalaupapa community who figures prominently in The Colony is Henry Nalaielua. I spent a lot of time with Henry as well during my reporting, both at Kalaupapa and on Oahu, at Kalihi Hospital. We spent our time discussing books and art and history, and some afternoons we just went to the movies. Henry had been diagnosed with leprosy in 1936, when he was eleven years old, and, as I described it in The Colony, was eventually sent to Kalaupapa:

As a boy, Henry had stood at the rail of a steamer and spotted the Molokai cliffs for the first time. “It took forever to get here,” he recalled about that day. “I thought I’d never get here.” When they had put him on the boat, Henry had known nothing about Kalaupapa and imagined it might be a wasteland. Then he saw the immense curtain of rock. “That’s when I knew that I’d like it here,” he said. “If there were cliffs, there were streams, and if there were streams, there were beaches. It would be like home.” One of Henry’s friends in the community, a man named Paul, had remarked of the residents, “The more we suffer, the more strength we have. The more suffering, the closer we are to one another. Life is that way. If you haven’t suffered, then you don’t know what joy is. The others may know something about joy, but those who have gone through hell and high water, I think they feel the joy deeper.”

While I was working on my book Henry was also working on a book, writing in longhand on large pads of paper. That memoir, No Footprints In the Sand, has now been published. Do Henry — and yourself — a favor: buy a copy.

In my laxness of late I’ve neglected to post some recent reviews of The Colony. So I’ll start adding them now. In September, the New England Journal of Medicine weighed in on the book. The full review will be in the appropriate spot shortly, but here’s the money quote:

The Colony begins as a tale of heartbreak, suffering, and terrible loneliness, but it ends as a testimony of triumph and survival, with Tayman writing of the poignant and successful efforts of the survivors of Molokai to overcome prejudice and disability and rejoin society. The book is a painstakingly researched social history, a morality play illuminating the best and worst of human nature, a page-turning narrative, and a deeply sympathetic drama featuring a fascinating cast of characters.

Given the dearth of bloggy entries of late, I’ve decided that I should broaden my scope of topics or this blog will waste away into nothingness. (Or at least during the sleepy lull between the hardcover publication of The Colony, some six months ago, and the upcoming paperback release.)

Before things wander too far afield from the book front, however, I want to congratulate my editor, Lisa Drew, on her retirement after 45 years in the business. Lisa was one of the first female editors in a very male-dominated book world, and during the course of her remarkable career she edited everyone from Alex Haley to Millie Bush. I find it telling that it was not a scribbling lap dog that tipped her into retirement, but me.

(Okay, so I wasn’t Lisa’s very last author. But I’m in the final dozen!)

Somehow it escaped my attention that The Colony was recently reviewed by “America’s Finest News Source” (and one of my favorite publications), The Onion. Their learned verdict? “A-”. Read more here.

A few weeks ago I headed to Washington D.C., just in time to see the cherry blossoms explode. Also to appear on C-Span’s Book TV. My interlocutor was Congressman Ed Case, D-HI, who represents the district that includes Kalaupapa, and who has been quoted on record that The Colony was not long enough. (Oh where you, Congressman Case, when my editor was hacking away at my prose?) Our subsequent lively discussion is viewable here.

Alas, I’ve been remiss with the postings. After several weeks of blurring and blurry media appearances, things have settled down again. So first the new news. The Colony audio book is out, should you have 13 hours to devote to its unabridged entirety. In the next few days I’ll post some audio clips, for those sampling at home.

Among the many radio interviews from last week were two long-form call-in shows, both on Public Radio. If you’d like to waste an hour or two, have a listen. (You’ll need to launch your Real Player to listen to these.) The first is from the Kathleen Dunn show, in Wisconsin — lots of chat about native son Joseph Dutton in this one. Earlier in the week I was in Washington D.C. talking with Kojo Nnamdi, and of course we touched on the Washington D.C.-based story of John Early: crank, victim, outlaw, and, as readers of The Colony know, the nation’s first leprosy activist.