Although it's been described as a memoir, author Waimea Williams considers "Aloha, Kaua'i" something other than autobiography. "What I have written is not primarily about myself, but the people who filled my world," she writes in the foreword.

The world is that of a Garden Island schoolgirl in the 1950s, a haole local not of the kama'aina elite. With enviable recall for detail, she conjures that time: when "kapu" was law and "kahuna" was whispered; when "nationality" courts reigned in high school yearbooks and hula schools taught only hapa haole songs; when killing a pig was a rite of passage for some boys, just as quitting school to have a baby was for some girls.

Williams explicates, in a knowing and minutely observed way, the Hawai'i of her time — the waning years of Hawai'i's "otherness," before 747s, satellite TV and the Internet closed the distance across the Pacific.

The book will not only call forth nostalgia in those whose lives touched this time but will explain it to those who grew up elsewhere or are too young to remember.

Williams intelligently ponders the underpinnings of today's "local" culture, and if she occasionally drifts into romanticism, she can be forgiven, for it is clear that she feels herself to owe much to those days and those people who were her early teachers. (I know there's a degree of romanticism because one story told to illustrate a point concerns a family I am close to, and the story she tells is, while generally accurate, just enough off true to lend it a greater nobility and weight than the bare facts might have allowed.)