Young Rachel Kalama, growing up in idyllic Honolulu in the 1890s, is part of a big, loving Hawaiian family, and dreams of seeing the far-off lands that her father, a merchant seaman, often visits. But at the age of seven, Rachel and her dreams are shattered by the discovery that she has leprosy. Forcibly removed from her family, she is sent to Kalaupapa, the isolated leper colony on the island of Moloka'i.
In her exile she finds a family of

...

This fascinating cultural and medical history of leprosy enriches our understanding of a still-feared biblical disease. It is a condition shrouded for centuries in mystery, legend, and religious fanaticism. Societies the world over have vilified its sufferers: by the sheer accident of mycobacterial infection, they have been condemned to exile and imprisonment-illness itself considered evidence of moral taint. Over the last 200 years, the story of...

Temperance Brennan, like her creator Kathy Reichs, is a brilliant, sexy forensic anthropologist called on to solve the toughest cases. But for Tempe, the discovery of a young girl's skeleton in Acadia, Canada, is more than just another assignment. Évangéline, Tempe's childhood best friend, was also from Acadia. Named for the character in the Longfellow poem, Évangéline was the most exotic person in Tempe's eight-year-old world. When Évangéline...

In 1948, a nineteen-year-old pearl diver's dreams of spending her life combing the waters of Japan's Inland Sea are shattered when she discovers she has leprosy. By law, she is exiled to an island leprosarium, where she is stripped of her dignity and instructed to forget her past. Her name is erased from her family records, and she is forced to select a new one. To the two thousand patients on the island of Nagashima, she becomes Miss Fuji. Although...

"The unknown story of the only leprosy colony in the continental United States, and the thousands of Americans who were exiled--hidden away with their "shameful" disease. Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the Mississippi River curls around an old plantation thick with trees, with a stately white manor house at its heart. Locals knew it as Carville--the site of the only leprosarium in the continental United States from 1894 until 1999, where generations...

"A remarkable story of a young man's loss of everything he deemed important, and his ultimate discovery that redemption can be taught by society's most dreaded outcasts." -John Grisham "Hilarious, astonishing, and deeply moving." -John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil The emotional, incredible true story of Neil White, a man who discovers the secret to happiness, leading a fulfilling life, and the importance of fatherhood...