Carl Alexander: Being an Island Boy, 1939-1957 is an assemblage of memoirs about the mid-twentieth century formative years of an island boy, of a Honolulu childhood in the 1940s and teen years in the l950s. Here is a nostalgic montage of Honolulu between World War Two and statehood in 1959, a window of a softer time - before jet planes and mass tourism, before extreme traffic congestion and freeways, and before the high rise concrete city that Honolulu became - a time when Hawaii was experiencing the last vestiges of a gentler more Hawaiian time. This autobiography tells the author's story in a number of separate memoir pieces, but it also tells the story of a Honolulu ripe with nostalgia and ripe for change.

These memories are meant for my descendants, but they are also meant for anyone interested in these historical snapshots of Hawaii in a quieter time. The book also recounts the history of Red Hale (ha-lay, Hawaiian for house), a family residence on the seawall near Diamond Head that was the first of the large wooden mansions to disappear in the onrush of development that has now encircled the seaward base of Diamond Head. The story of Red Hale is of a canary in a coal mine, a glimpse and a warning of what was to come.