Preface
At 8:00 AM on Friday, September 26, 1947, a thirty-nine-year-old Honolulu physician named Edwin Chung-Hoon began to examine his second patient of the day. Chung-Hoon was a graduate of the Washington University School of Medicine, and his specialty was dermatology....

Excerpted from Chapter 1, “Run”
By nine-thirty in the evening on the last Friday in June 1893, Deputy Sheriff Louis Stolz had one fugitive in chains. He pulled his prisoner along a twisty shoulder of valley, the path lit by a declining moon, until he reached a meadow studded with volcanic rock....

Excerpted from Chapter 8, “Rush Slowly”
Damien decided that he would visit each exile at least once a week, a circuit that required five days. He began at the hospital. Inside the lamp-lit ward, patients lay on woven grass mats and rusted cots, sporadically tended by untrained kokuas....

Excerpted from Chapter 9, “Be Ambitious and Bold”
On a Wednesday morning in early 1873, the inter-island steamer Kilauea completed its weekly run from Honolulu to Hilo, by way of Maui and Molokai. Isabella Bird, of Yorkshire, England, was among its passengers, a genial and wry forty-two-year-old with chronic back pain and a tendency toward depression....

Excerpted from Chapter 13, “Human Soil”
The dead Japanese carpenter was sprawled on a dirt road on the northern edge of the island of Hawaii, a half-burned cigarette smoldering beside his head. His wife claimed that two white males in rubber overcoats had ambushed them and murdered her husband....