A new anthology, “Island Memoirs: The Days of Our Youth,” serves up brief, digestible reminiscences excerpted from the memoirs of prominent islanders in a variety of occupations, from the 1930s through the early 21st century. The unifying theme is a focus on the times when their characters and careers were taking shape.

It’s surprising and disappointing that, among 17 narrators, only one is a woman: Frances Kakugawa, the Big Island poet and teacher. The anthology opens with her story of how, as a schoolchild, she began speaking standard English instead of pidgin out of her desire to become a writer and escape remote Kapoho village. She risked the “ultimate put-down”: “Eh! You tink you haole?”, but to her surprise, many of her classmates cheer her on: “Yeah, you goin’ college.” The book’s closing chapter is Kakugawa’s account of the disappearance of Kapoho beneath the 1960 Kilauea lava flow.

Singer Don Ho was born in Kakaako, known as “the poor part of town” in the 1930s, and played football at Kamehameha Schools with Larry Mehau, “who could (have been) King Kamehameha. The chief of war,” and who was later rumored to be godfather of local crime. After his freshman year at Springfield College in Massachusetts, Ho and a fellow Hawaii student took a road trip through the South and were shocked that restaurants refused to serve them because of their color.

As kids from Kalihi taking a day trip to Kahala Beach, future state Gov. Ben Cayetano and his friends were shocked to be shouted at by an angry haole man and, later, told to leave the beach by a policeman called by a haole lady who watched from behind the hedge of her home.

Rather than growing bitter and isolationist, Ho, Cayetano and the others in this volume — including producer Tom Moffatt, Sen. Dan Akaka, Judge Sam King, Hansen’s disease ambassadors Henry Nalaielua and Makia Malo — helped bring together Hawaii’s diverse population through music, legal justice and progressive social change. Champion surfer Fred Hemmings describes the inclusive legacy of his mentor, Duke Kahanamoku. Roy Kodani, a former Hawaii deputy attorney general, remembers childhood visits with his father, a Hilo hardware store owner, to deliver goods to an isolated Korean farmer whose desperate loneliness and fondness for the family were revealed only at the end of his life.

At a time when hopes of immigration and citizenship are being severely curtailed, “Island Memoirs” is a timely reminder that many Hawaii residents were born before 1959, the year the U.S. territory and former independent kingdom became a state.