Sarah Vowell thinks of Hawaii as the most American state. She argues that it’s “breathtaking in its beauty, sometimes hideously developed, overwhelmingly religious, impoverished (except for pockets of staggering wealth), crass and spiritual all at once.” In Unfamiliar Fishes, she will explore the exceptional history of Hawaii with her personal reporting and trademark smart-aleckiness to find out the odd and emblematic history of Hawaii, and how it got to be that way. She will explain how Hawaii is Manifest Destiny’s plate lunch.

There will be cannibalism. There will be incest. There will massacres. There will be con men and dreamers. There will be racism. There will be Theodore Roosevelt. There will be history and Obama and America and opportunistic missionaries and warring whalers and kings and queens. And there will even be lepers. And therefore it will be a great and entertaining story of American history, told in Vowell’s inimitable voice and in her unconventional style.

Unfamiliar Fishes is a vacation into a colorful and riveting period in history with America’s favorite historical travel companion, Sarah Vowell.