History often pulled up a chair at Jane Marshall Goodsill’s dining room table. As a girl, she would sit and listen as her father, prominent attorney Marshall Goodsill, and mother, Ruth, chatted with the myriad guests they welcomed within their Vladimir Ossipoff-designed walls. (The Ossipoffs were dear friends, by the way.)
Her book,
Voices of Hawai‘i, feels just like an invitation to that table, with the opportunity to eavesdrop on Goodsill’s conversations with more than 70 people who helped shape our modern history: leaders, activists, ranchers, entertainers, authors, journalists. She began her interviews not with a book in mind, but as a quest to learn more about her father’s job as a corporate attorney in Hawai‘i. But along the way, one talk story session inevitably led to another fascinating one and eventually, almost three years later, Goodsill had dozens of oral histories recorded on her iPhone.