Sylvia Kennedy once told me that on the last day of sixth grade, in postwar Honolulu, the teacher made a sobering announcement to the class: when they returned in the fall, they would have to wear shoes. She chuckled at the memory, and I was amused, too, to think how far she had come from that laid-back environment.
As soon as she could, Sylvia, like Huck, would light out for the territory, for the wide world beyond her island. She enrolled at UCLA as an art student but dropped out after meeting her husband, a cultural anthropologist, whose research took them, and eventually their two young children, to some challenging locations. For a year, in 1960–61, the Kennedy family lived in a cave among the Tarahumara of northern Mexico. Sylvia chopped off the head of a rattlesnake that dared venture inside. (Her baby daughter was with her; otherwise, Sylvia was...