It's been a rich year for books that capture the Islands' social fabric. Here are two that profile inimitable people whose lives are intertwined with Hawai'i's history:

"NO FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND: A Memoir of Kalaupapa" by Henry Nalaielua, with Sally-Jo Bowman; Watermark, paper, $16.95

Although the back cover of Henry Nalaielua's memoir declares it "a journey of exile," there is little sense of exile about this frank and refreshingly unvarnished as-told-to story.

Nalaielua starts life in a small Big Island plantation town and has no idea at age 10, accompanying his mother by steamboat to Honolulu, that he, like two of his sisters before him, has Hansen's disease, or that the diagnosis will mean confinement to Kalaupapa, on Moloka'i.

When the truth begins to dawn — at the gate of Kalihi Hospital, where his mother is turned away in tears and he is confined — he is confused and scared. But in the book's very next scene, he sits on a dormitory bed being served a pork-chop supper and deciding that pork chops were his new favorite.

This progression foreshadows Nalaielua's long, eventful life: As with his diagnosis, he continues to be surprised — often tragically — by the circumstances he encounters. Even after treatment becomes available, his health is plagued by the side effects of the disease. He loves and loses several times. He is able to keep neither of his children. When his health does improve, he is thrown into the world with comically little training or preparation for even the day-to-day tasks of life.

But whatever happens, he looks it in the eye, finds the good and heles on — generally with a song in his heart. (He is a talented self-taught musician.)

The book contains chilling moments: the day of his eldest child's birth, when his wife, also a Hansen's disease patient, is forbidden even to see her child. He is "on parole," she isn't. Nalaielua is full of joy, just having glimpsed their daughter in the nursery. But the sweet moment is soon awash in bitterness when he returns to his wife's isolation room to hear her spare comment: "I'm glad for you." Unable to raise the child in Kalaupapa because of regulations that barred uninfected children from the settlement, the couple allowed a relative to hanai the child.

"There are no words to describe how much it hurt," he writes of losing his daughter and of the way his wife was treated.

Still, there is not one drop of self-pity here. Or rage. And if anyone is entitled to self-pity and rage it is someone who, for half his life, was stigmatized and, for all practical purposes, imprisoned because had the misfortune to become ill.

Nalaielua, in the capable hands of his co-author, award-winning freelance writer Sally-Jo Bowman, reveals himself as a humble man graced with more than his share of optimism and humor. He loves and laughs easily. He works hard. He hesitates to see himself as a leader, though he holds positions of responsibility in the Kalaupapa and Hawaiian communities. He has to be talked into writing his autobiography and consents only because, he says, "I like talking about Kalaupapa" and believes that people are beginning to listen and understand the point of the patients' stories.

Though he has been in ill health, Nalaielua, now 81, still lives in Kalaupapa.

"HILO HATTIE: A Legend in Our Time" by Milly Singletary; Mutual, paperback, $13.95

Hilo Hattie wasn't always a store. First it was a song, though not a very successful one. Then it was a person — Clara "Hilo Hattie" Nelson — and she, and that song, became about one of the most successful Hawai'i performing artists ever. The stores, which contracted to use her name but were never hers, came after that.

The late Milly Singletary's biography of the irrepressible comic hula dancer Hilo Hattie, originally published in 1979 and re-issued now by Mutual, is a collection of essays that crisscross the artist's life, pieced together from diaries, scrapbooks and papers, from media reports and more than 200 interviews with people who knew her.

Nelson died in 1979, but this unchanged manuscript leaves the impression that, though in ill health, she might still be living in her Ka'a'awa home being lovingly cared for by her husband, Carlyle. It's rather a nice fiction to think so.

The book hops confusingly from period to period, getting ahead of and behind its story with little regard for the reader's need for chronology. Still, by the end, you have a detailed picture of a woman who began her career as a schoolteacher, became a comic hula star almost by accident but took with her into show business values she taught her students: honesty, integrity, down-to-earth wisdom and making work fun.

It reads, for the most part, like talk-story, with Hilo Hattie herself often narrating the tales.

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.