Books
The Ingenious Life of Melbourne Smith
ISBN-13: 978-0996445405
He re-created magnificent pre-industrial sailing ships, and built them using pre-industrial tools. He's a brilliant, self-taught naval architect and artist who has ignited widespread interest in the history of sail. And he was an odd kid who got into shipwrecks and danger and impossible dreams. True story.
Five Wheels Five Corners
ISBN-13: 978-0970620033
In the mid 1990's I wrote a tabloid newspaper column by that name, and these are the best early pieces. The paper's distribution radiated out from Makawao and Ha'iku, the gulch country of East Maui. The mood here is celebratory and joking. (No, Ka'ahumanu did not actually come back to visit the shopping mall named for her. But, if she had, read about it here.) This is a second edition, enlarged, with side-notes proving that the past is never what it used to be.
False Confessions: A Life in Hawaii
ISBN-13: 978-0970620071
Sometimes the only way to get at the truth is to tell extravagant lies—or, as Huck Finn called them, "stretchers." These forty-one short pieces first appeared as editorial columns in an upstart newspaper that wasn't afraid to poke, satirize, and glorify its home community, the Pacific island called Maui. There are plenty of facts here, and lots of fibs. To avoid confusion, readers simply need to keep in mind that the least believable elements are the facts. Spoofs. Unlikely eyewitness accounts. Grossly distorted reminiscences. True stories of courage with uncelebrated subjects—such as banana plants, Portuguese immigrants, an anarchist sailor, the last king of Hawai‘i, and several memorable dogs. Marvelous yarns—like the one about the man forced to confront his own lifetime of personal garbage, or the man who invents a machine operated by the power of silence. Prepare to be inspired, perplexed, delighted, and infuriated. No one’s ever written this way about the real Hawai‘i before. Maybe because no one’s ever dared. Selected for the Elliot Cades Award, the top literary prize in the State of Hawaii.
Lurigancho
ISBN- 13: 978-0970620057
A sensational—and true—prison escape story in the tradition of Papillon and Midnight Express. Edward Padilla, an American, is the only living person ever to escape from the world's foulest prison—Lurigancho Prison in Peru. Here is the true story of his four-year ordeal and his miraculous flight to freedom. A founding member of the now notorious "hippie" church called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Ed is one of the few surviving core members of that group, the only one to come forward with brutal honesty in the telling of this story.
The Imagination Book: A Special Delivery
By: June Palmer & Paul Wood
"The Imagination Book: A Special Delivery" is a wordless children's
book that comprises beautiful watercolor pages created by artist
June Lee Palmer. Recently completed, not yet published, this story embodies the Writing Without Pencils approach to literacy and to the potential power of imaginative writing through books.
To watch the four-plus minute preview, enter the password. Or contact Paul.
