Big Island author pens book, plans book signing

Big Island resident and author Jeffrey L. Gross recently released “Waipio Valley: A Polynesian Journey from Eden to Eden.”

A book signing is slated 1-3 p.m. Oct. 29 in the main lobby of Courtyard Marriot’s King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel in Kailua-Kona.

Described as a groundbreaking book packed with information and knowledge, “Waipio Valley: A Polynesian Journey from Eden to Eden” describes the amazing journey of the Polynesians, the “nomads of the sea”, across a third of the circumference of the Earth. Many voyages covering thousands of miles across the world’s largest ocean in double-hull canoes constructed from hollowed-out logs and built with Stone Age technology—tools of stone, bone and shell and navigating by the stars of the night sky.

The book takes readers on a journey from Kalana i Hauola, the biblical “Garden of Eden” located in Sumer, Mesopotamia, along the shore of the Persian Gulf, to the Indus River Valley of ancient Vedic India, to Egypt where some of the ancestors of the Polynesians were on the Israelite Exodus, through island Southeast Asia and across the vast Pacific Ocean where the Polynesians resided on numerous tropical island paradises such as Raiatea Island, Tahiti, home of the Taputapuatea Marae, the most holy temple in Polynesia, before reaching Hawaii Island and Waipio Valley; the last Polynesian “Garden of Eden.”

Gross is an architect living on Big Island. Born in Washington, D.C., he graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and first lived in the Hawaiian Islands during the late 1970s-80s, when he became interested in Polynesian history and traditional culture that led to the research for this book.

Published by Xlibris Publishing, “Waipio Valley: A Polynesian Journey from Eden to Eden” is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.