| Title | : | Coming Into the Country |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0374522871 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780374522872 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 448 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1977 |
| Awards | : | National Book Critics Circle Award General Nonfiction (1977) |
Coming Into the Country Reviews
-
Alaska, the early 1960s. Darkness covered the land. The latest winter storm, which by then had already lasted half a century, still showed no sign of ending. The cold and the snow were beginning to wear the proud Alaskans down. Then Russia invaded. Again. The fledgling state was unprepared for war, and so the Alaskan Militia fell back before the forces of the Dark Lord Stalin, and the Red Army of Moscow reached the walls of Juneau. For two days and nights the city was bombarded by communist orcs. On February 11, 1964, the third day of the seige, a light appeared on the horizon. It was the sun! After fifty years of endless night, dawn finally broke over Alaska! Rousing the defenders, the mighty wizard Ted Stevens the White led the final charge and drove the Red Army into the sea. Alaska won the day.
Ten years passed.
In the early 70s, the Prophet McPhee came to Alaska. He had had visions since the Great Dawn, terrible, awe-inspiring visions of a woman in red riding a war-grizzly. The priests he spoke to all agreed: it was the Mother of Grizzlies, Daughter of Alaska, the great Messiah-Queen of the prophecies who would restore the mighty Alaskan Empire to glory and lead Her armies out of the North to conquer the Lower 48. The Return of the Sun had marked the hour of Her birth, but none had seen sign of Her since. And so the Prophet McPhee vowed to find Her. Assembling a party of shamen, slaves (bearing gifts of gold, jewels, and newspapers), and mages from the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, the Department of Fish and Game, and other government agencies, McPhee set out into the widerness. Questions arose: was the Mother of Grizzlies also Daughter of Grizzlies, or was She merely a feral child, raised and educated in the ways of the bear? Would they find Her feasting on fish and berries, or did She hibernate in the caves of bears, sleeping until Alaska needed a savior? Russia had been silent for many years, but would surely invade again.
The expedition failed; most of the party was eaten by wolves or lost in skirmishes with the National Park Service, so they returned to Juneau. It was clear that, wherever the Queen of Alaska was, She would not reveal Herself until the time was right. So Alaska waited, and prepared. And the question was asked: where would Her Capital be? Juneau was not grand enough, and Anchorage and Fairbanks still lay in ruins from the war, so the Prophet McPhee again set out into the wilderness, again with his shamen and slaves and government bureaucrats, to find a suitable place to build Her Palace. And again the shamen were eaten by wolves, and the bureaucrats bickered, and the slaves revolted, so McPhee went back to Juneau.
The quest seemed hopeless. McPhee had not found the Chosen One or built Her City, and all his shamen were dead. But, inspired by rumors of a secret messiah breeding program, he set off alone, on a third expedition, following the elusive trail of a powerful sisterhood of sorceress-nuns. Here the narrative grows sketchy, as McPhee’s accounts of interviews of dozens of gold miners, hermits, holy men, ice-mages, and the occasional talking bear led him in dizzying circles, endlessly searching for a treasure that chose to remain secret.
McPhee apparently never found the Mother of Grizzlies, and left Alaska in disgrace. There are rumors, however, that he drank himself to death, only to be resurrected by an unidentified hirsute girl, but those stories remain unverified. Even McPhee’s account must be questioned. Were his visions true? Did he truly foresee the birth and rise of Alaska’s savior? If so, She remains hidden, and perhaps none will know the hour of Her coming.
Where is the bear and the rider? Where is the voice that is grating? IA! IA! SARAH PALIN FHTAGN! -
I was really hoping this would be about geology, along the lines of Basin and Range. It wasn't. It's divided into three sections; in the first, McPhee wanders around unpopulated Alaska with several other men in several canoes/kayaks. I think one was from the Sierra Club, one from the Bureau of Land Management, etc. They fished to supplement their food supplies, and camped along the rivers and streams. The second section was about the attempt to get Alaska's capital moved from Juneau. I now know more about this issue than I ever wanted to. At the end of the section it really sounded like the move was going to come off; people voted and wanted the capital moved to Willow. (This was written in 1977.) But a check of the primary authority on such matters, Wikipedia, shows that Juneau is still the capital, so McPhee must have been stoned or something when he wrote that sentence.
In the third section McPhee moved to Eagle, a teeny tiny town on the Yukon River, and pretty much just interviewed the residents of Eagle and told us their stories. Some are interesting; some aren't. (The 2010 census showed the population of Eagle as 86.)
In spite of the need for women to be tough in the wilds of Alaska, there are no women's libbers here. The women do all the cookin' and much, much more; wood choppin', skinnin' of critters, waitin' for the menfolk to come a-home from their trips.
Maybe a few people sound relatively sane, but most sound a bit crazy. Or a lot crazy. There are your Cliven Bundy types up there. They don't like the people of the lower 48 dictating the rules in Alaska. Alaska is different. People of Alaska, hear me: Alaska is not different. It is a state that in many respects is qualitatively different from, say, Connecticut. It is not legally, Constitutionally, different. Because you build a cabin on a plot of land, trap and hunt your own critters for food, bulldoze yourself a gravel landing strip for your little plane, it does not follow that you now own that land. Don't get all uppity when the Bureau of Land Management comes to tell you you don't actually own that land. You know how I know I own my home? Because I wrote a check; the bank agreed to supply the rest; we had a ceremony (with lawyers for both sides) where we all signed many sheets of paper; and at the end of it one of these sheets of paper was the title and deed to my home. Plus I pay real estate taxes on this home. If the Bureau of Land Management comes to tell me I don't own my home, then we have a problem. You, Alaska trapper and fisher with no title to your little cabin, you don't have a problem.
McPhee's writing style wears thin. This was 438 pages of it. -
Things I learned about Alaska:
-- Merrill Field, a light-plane airfield in Anchorage, handles fifty-four thousand more flights per year than Newark International. This is so because bushplane trips are more common than taxis or driving, the roads being what they are.
-- Fried cranberries will help a sore throat.
-- That somethings are better left unchanged or not re-named:
"What would you call that mountain, Willie?"
"Denali. I'll go along with the Indians that far."
Everyone aboard was white but Willie (William Igiagruq Hensley), of Arctic Alaska, and he said again, "Denali. What the hell did McKinley ever do?
I learned the difference between a visitor and a tourist in Alaska: A tourist stays a week and drops four hundred dollars. A visitor comes with a shirt and a twenty-dollar bill and doesn't change either one.
I learned that Alaska is a great place for nicknames: Pete the Pig, Pistolgrip Jim, Groundsluice Bill, Coolgardie Smith, Codfish Tom, Doc LaBooze, the Evaporated Kid, Fisty McDonald, John the Baptist, Cheeseham Sam, and the Man with the Big Nugget. I actually came across a Codfish in my own travels, but I have an odd job.
I learned that bear scat is "fairly, but not acutely fresh" when it "glistens but has stopped smoking." Not everything I learned will I actually use.
I learned that Alaska, at least the Alaska of 1977, was a place where people, tired of government and other people, fled to. I learned that the government followed them there and refused to let them alone. I learned that Alaskans are prone to a philosophy: LIVE EACH DAY SO THAT YOU CAN LOOK EVERY DAMN MAN IN THE EYE AND TELL HIM TO GO TO HELL.
We need such people. At least we need a place where such people could go. A place I might go if it wasn't so cold. A place so vast and unpeopled that if anyone could figure out how to steal Italy, Alaska would be a place to hide it.
This was another wonderful trip that John McPhee took me on. It's dated, to be sure. But wonderful characters are portrayed; good stories told. In the battle between independent, brave individuals and a pedantic, fuzzy-wuzzy government, John McPhee leaves no doubt whose side he is on. -
A year or two out of college I was employed at a bookshop in Seattle, earning little more than minimum wage. For a change of scene, I signed up with some friends to work the salmon season at a cannery in Alaska. It was rough work, seven days a week, 8am to 11pm (or to 1am on nights when you had cleanup duty). We didn’t get to see much of “real Alaska,” but you could feel it around you. The wilderness.
The cannery was located on an island in the southeast of the state. The town was small for anyplace other than Alaska, with not much more than a single road. The rest of the island was uninhabited. People wandering into the interior were sometimes never heard from again. No one went in search of them. It was assumed the wolves or bears had got them. The moss and muskeg would hide their bones.
Though I saw little of Alaska, it was enough to grasp its fascination. If my sense of it had faded some over the past twenty years, McPhee’s wonderful book has helped to revive it. I suddenly find myself scheming ways to get the wife and kids up north on vacation as soon as possible.
One of my college professors first introduced me to John McPhee. It was a writing course, and he was reading brief passages from one of McPhee’s books (I don’t recall which one), lingering over certain passages and expostulating on the genius of his prose, his crystalline expressions. McPhee is rarely flashy. There is no false posturing. He is curious, broad, but crisp, fresh, clear.
My former favorite of McPhee’s books (among those I have read) was Basin and Range, but Coming into the Country is just as good. The first part of it follows McPhee on an outing in the total wild of the Brooks Range. The second has to do with the politics of the state circa 1977. The third, and by far the longest, is the best. In it, McPhee lives with and among the trappers, the miners, the townspeople, the hippie kids and the Athapaskan natives of the Yukon River country near the Canadian border.
In this small but broadly scattered and loose-knit community, McPhee finds all the hope, discontent and anxiety of the human condition. It’s a parable (perhaps) of the riddling complexities that face us today, finding ourselves to be a part of the natural order and yet standing, somehow, outside of it. -
I've read this twice, many years apart. Mostly a historic document now -- but what a history!
One of the rereads was in our camp at Flat, an old and formerly very, very rich placer camp. It was a pretty miserable job (cheap jr. company, but I needed the work), but a nice group of co-workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat,_A... Iditarod was the river port for Flat. Somewhere I have a handful of blank checks from the vault of the old Bank of Iditarod. . . .
Tony's is the review to read:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... McPhee is just a flat amazing writer. 4.4 stars, by memory. -
The best of all the many books written by Outsiders about Alaska.
-
This book has meant a lot to me as an Alaskan interested in the raggedy interplay between development and conservationism, although I had never read it in its entirety. Now I have. I would say this book at best offers a kind, sympathetic view of all sorts of Alaskans circa 1977, a period which I just barely remember from grade school. I still recall the statewide debate on whether to give "Mount McKinley" the new/old name of "Denali" as part of ANILCA, then called the D-2 Lands Bill, which was a hot-button topic (i.e. federal take-over) for Alaskans such as my parents. I remember the debate to move the capital to Willow. I remember John Denver's goodwill trip to Alaska to promote conservation and the passage of ANILCA. It was all HIGHLY charged politics in which the feds were dabbling, playing, frivolizing with OUR land. The outgrowth of both the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act are INCREDIBLY far reaching with regards to living and working in Alaska today. In that respect, the first two chapters of the book are now dated and rather nostalgic, kind of a time-capsule of what was going on while these landmark Congressional laws were being sussed out.
The chapter "Coming Into The Country" (nearly half of the book) on the Yukon River/Charley River area of Interior Alaska was by far the best part of the book, focusing on the communities of Central, Circle, and Eagle and the idealistic, sometimes hard-nosed characters that live there. Although McPhee, in what I've read, was an impressionable young man leaning to the side of environmental conservation at the expense of economic development, I think his writing in this book shows both a reverence for Alaska's brand of wilderness (in a word, awesome) as well as a sympathetic, humane perspective on the toll that Congressional protectionism, environmental regulation, and romantic idealism has on the lives of real families living in "the country".
(The best writing is the transcription of journal entries made by a young man, Rich Corazza, living alone in a cabin somewhere around Eagle. This section is one third into the last section "Coming Into The Country" and made me grin and laugh out loud. A true seeker with a good dose of humor and longing.) -
“If anyone could figure out how to steal Italy, Alaska would be the place to hid it." What a vivid way to describe Alaska's immensity. 'There has been a host of excellent books on Alaska. My favorite until recently was Joe McGinnis's
Going to Extremes but John McPhee's Coming Into the Country is wonderful, too.
McPhee's book is divided into three parts: first an exploration of wilderness described during the course of a canoe/kayak trip down the Salmon River. Much in the manner of the river, his descriptions meander into all sorts of eddies and whirlpools. His description of bush pilots is priceless. On one occasion he is flying (a regularly scheduled airline, mind you) in a single engine plane in horrible weather. The pilot is skimming the trees to find landmarks because he can't see anything. He has a map on his lap, but suddenly hands it to a passenger to help figure out where they are. "I had been chewing gum so vigorously that the hinges of my jaws would ache for two days."
Stumbling on a grizzly bear in a blueberry patch (fortunately upwind), he muses on the best way to survive a grizzly's charge - no consensus of opinion, but most survivors believe the best thing to do is stand absolutely still and shout as loudly as possible, for that is the least likely reaction the bear, which does not have good sight, would expect of game. Running away is useless for grizzlies are very fast. They are also quite coordinated. They enjoy schussing down snow-covered mountains at 96 feet/second through trees and around boulders only to screech to a stop, stand up and walk away, just before going -over the edge of a cliff.
The second part of the book discusses the Alaskan government's search for a new capital and the conflict that generated. Juneau really makes a lousy site because of its remoteness, not to mention its horrible landing approach to the airport. Alaska attracts very independent and anti-authoritarian types of people so it witnesses a battle between those suffering from the "Sierra Club Syndrome" or others fondly embracing the "Dallas Scenario."
Many of these folks are affectionately profiled in the third section. John Cook, for example, has consciously tried to eliminate the need for money and authority. He tries to live on $1,500 a year (this was written in the mid seventies); he has a series of
trap lines and rarely uses a parka, even at -30'. The closest town is Eagle, about 30 miles away via dog sled, with a population of about 100. Almost all live by the ut restrictions on code, "Never put restrictions on any individual.... Up here they ain't gettin' you for spittin' on the sidewalk."
Ironically, most moved there for the space, yet land is less available (as of 1977) than in the lower '48 because when Alaska became a state deals were made with the native Americans and the federal government to set aside almost the entire state as either a reservation or park land. Whereas before statehood someone could build a cabin 80 miles from nowhere, now a government helicopter might fly over and throw them out. Homesteading no longer exists, but in Alaska that loss seems especially poignant in territory where you might have to fly somewhere to take a shower. -
I love McPhee's writing. I first read this book when it was published in part in the New Yorker, and again soon after it was published as a book. So this is the third time I've read it. I've read maybe ten books three times, so I really, really like this.
First, because McPhee writes so beautifully. He could write about anything and I would read it. I've even read his geology books. Not because I like geology, (I don't), but because I just eat up his words. It is like eating chocolate, I usually stop when the supply runs out, not because I'm finished.
Second, the people and the spirit that makes up Alaska. Everything is so unbelievably huge. I love the stories about people who cut tractors up into pieces, fly them to remote regions, weld them back together so they can build an airstrip for a bigger plane.
Third, the Alaska he writes about was disappearing when he wrote it, and has been replaced with at least two generations of Alaska since then.
I will be visiting Alaska this summer and I am looking forward to seeing what's new and what remains of the old. Will it be strip malls? I'll let you know. -
A bit boring in some segments in the middle, but the book redeems itself with John McPhee's wonderful prose style and the fierce personalities of his subjects.
-
It is ten-thirty, and about time for bed. Everything burnable—and more, too—has long since gone into the fire. We burn our plastic freeze-dry bags and we burn our Swiss Miss cocoa packets. If we have cans—devilled ham, Spam—we burn them, until all hint of their contents is gone.
Please, don't burn garbage while camping. Aluminum foil, plastics, styrofoam and batteries don't just disappear when burned. Burning food residue from unlined cans and packing them out is ok, though.
What's Burning in Your Campfire? Garbage In, Toxics Out. (or if you prefer,
pdf format)
You might also enjoy:
✱
Kings of the Yukon (highly recommended)
✱
The Lonely Land (highly recommended)
✱
Made of Salmon: Alaska Stories from the Salmon Project
✱
Tip of the Iceberg
✱
Two in the Far North
✱
The Only Kayak
✱
Rhythm of the Wild
✱
Rowing to Latitude
✱
Passage to Juneau
✱
Arctic Dreams
✱
Crossing Open Ground
✱
One Man's Wilderness
✱
The Good Rain -
McPhee's Coming Into the Country is rightly considered a classic with its detailed description on life in mid-1970s Alaska. Much of the writing is stunning, packed full of river trips and anecdotes about characters the author encountered during his many months in the country. He captures well the contradictions embodied in many Alaskans: a thirst for solitude alternating with a an affinity for social gatherings, an abhorrence of government even as they live and trap on public land, and the sparse population combined with a sense that there are few places left to go, live, and be free. McPhee's writing style full of rapid fire quotes summing up various points of view is effective in conveying these contradictions. He also captures an important transitional time in the state's history when the Trans-Alaskan oil pipeline and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act were new realities. Read nearly 40 years after it was published, I believe the book reflects an important historical slice of Alaskan culture.
Despite the overall high quality of writing, I found that some parts dragged (I found myself skimming dozens of pages related to a possible shift of Alaska's capital city from Juneau to parts unknown). If 4.5 stars were possible, that is what it would receive from me. -
John McPhee is one of my journalistic heroes. I read him obsessively when I was younger and yearning to become a journalist myself. This book, about Alaska, is perhaps my favorite, or at least the one I'd recommend to someone who has never read McPhee before. These days, when everyone seems to have a severely truncated attention span, perhaps McPhee can seem a touch long-winded, but I completely disagree -- I don't think he wastes a sentence. He does write in a pre-internet way, and that, in my opinion, is nothing but good. Read him on paper, not an e-reader, if possible. Even better, take this book in your backpack and head up to Alaska. Perhaps take the public ferry there, out of Bellingham, Washington. It's extremely reasonable. Bring a sleeping bag and sleep on the sundeck, saving your money. You see the same sights as the most expensive cruise ships in the world, and you'll meet some amazing people. Read "Coming into the Country" at night. See the northern lights. Feel goosebumps all over. Change your life forever. That's what I did, and I haven't regretted it for a moment.
-
I'd easily put this in my top ten books ever read category, right up there alongside another McPhee book, Annals of the Former World.
This book is written for folks like myself, that are obsessed with the ideal of living in Alaska, of getting away from it all, of the dream of escaping from a corrupt country, into a country that while in America, is definitely not of America. McPhee has some of the most wonderful prose I have ever read, and he tackles with it the three frontiers, all wild to different degrees: the political, the conservational, and the individual. The individual frontier being the most fascinating of all as he paints a living picture of the type of men that "don't fit in". -
Brilliant three-part, million-facet look at Alaska. My favorite part is probably the first--"The Encircled River"--which is literally a textbook example of how to write a travel narrative, with a grizzly at each end. The middle part is sly political commentary, but the last and longest part is what McPhee is always doing: introducing you to people and arranging that you see the world from their eyes, even when they can't do that for each other. The scale and the number of inhabitants of Eagle, AK, and environs is suitably Alaskan, and so alien to what I like, believe, care for, or share that it is astounding how long I spent in that place and still enjoyed myself. It's always McPhee, without a wristwatch, terrified of grizzlies, and listening loudly that makes this work. Recommended for social distancing.
-
It's hard to believe this book is almost 35 years old, a long time in this genre, and one wonders how he would report a visit to Alaska now. I have enjoyed many of his pieces, and this one is pretty good too. If I have any qualms, it might be that he is a tad repetitive and some of the information was perhaps a bit more than I wanted to hear about. I think it could easily have been a hundred pages trimmed, but I guess you can always skip past things if you wanted to. Oddly enough, even as beautiful as so many people say Alaska is, it is one place I do not have that much of a craze to visit.
-
Alaska is a fantastic setting and McPhee intertwines a lot of themes in interesting ways: Frontierism, environmental preservation, geopolitics, native rights, individuality and self sufficiency, mining history... I think it falls off a little in the 3rd section as it becomes less tightly structured and more of a series of biographical vignettes and a portrait of bush country. The first and second parts are among the best I've read of him.
-
Who would have thought an anthropological, almost ethnographic, account of the author's time spent in the nation's Last Frontier, the great North of Alaska, just a handful of years after its admission to the Union as the 49th state, would be so wholly engaging. Not this city boy.
John McPhee was a Princeton-educated easterner from New Jersey with an interest in preservation and environmental concerns, but also an extraordinary ability to capture peoples with his depiction of their most mundane moments: foraging for food, constructing shelter in the subarctic wild, and even subsisting on public assistance in the extreme northwest fringes of the country. Yet he brings to life an assortment of highly developed real-life characters just living their usual lives under very unusual circumstances.
The book is largely sectioned off into accounts of the author's personal travails through the bush north of Fairbanks but south of the North Slope: bears, ptarmigans, graylings, Eskimos, and ice cold glacial rivers. Then the story moves south to the story of site selection for the potential move of the capital from Juneau to Anchorage. Political intrigue, tensions between locals and the state and federal government. Bears. The Anchorage media sought to pressure a move closer to the center of population in the state, while Juneau persisted despite its remote location to the extreme southeast of the state. Finally, the author moves the story to the tiny towns north and east of Fairbanks such as Circle, Eagle, and Tok, where only the hardiest of diehards will brave the extreme winters, and bears, along the Yukon River at minus sixty and seventy below zero.
I was amazed and impressed with the honesty and utterly guileless approach the author took to writing of river and bush people who are self-described isolationists. McPhee genuinely loves his subjects and relates their love for the land, despite their eccentricities, gruffness, and the endless cycle of death that pervades the wild. "You look at this country, it hits you in the face. . . . That life and death are not a duality. They're just simply here--life, death--in the all-pervading mesh that holds things together."
It's a rare thing to find a pick that captivates each time I pick it up, which reads so fluidly and seamlessly that it's akin to catching up with a longtime acquaintance. I read this book in preparation for an upcoming trip to Alaska, and what I found was a world of wonder unlocked by the narrative of a keen observer who loved those he observed.
I am looking forward to my trip. -
This book was a challenge for me. McPhee divided his exploration of Alaska into three sections--the first, stage-setting section on the northern tree line; the second, uses the search for an ideal site for a new state capital to explore urban Alaska; and the final section, on "the bush," really focuses on the motives and lifestyles of in-migrants to the state. I breezed through the first two parts; the relocation of the state capital (which never happened) in particular was literally a bird's eye view of Alaskan cities and their inhabitants. The third part, however, desperately needed editing: descriptions of grizzly dangers, gold-sluicing methods, and conflicts among resource-hungry and cabin-fevered Yukon inhabitants became monotonous and overly repetitive. McPhee clearly became enamored of the rugged individualists who chose to leave the Lower Forty-eight behind to build lives based on subsistence and skills-building. While his book does not gloss over their less admirable qualities--a tendency toward paranoia, chaos, alchoholism, and particularly misogyny--he comes down firmly for their willingness to pit themselves against nature. Surveying the environmental effects of one gold-mining team's efforts, he writes, "This pretty little stream is being disassembled in the name of gold.... Am I disgusted? Manifestly not.... This mine is a cork on the sea. Meanwhile (and, possibly more seriously), the relationship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I have seen in Alaska--both of them self-reliant beyond the usual reach of the term, the characteristic formed by this country." (410) This celebration of masculine triumph over nature is nothing new, and is disappointing from a writer who can be such a subtle thinker.
-
“What had struck me most in the isolation of this wilderness was an abiding sense of paradox. In its raw, convincing emphasis on the irrelevance of the visitor, it was forcefully, importantly repellent. It was no less strongly attractive—with a beauty of nowhere else, composed in turning circles. If the wild land was indifferent, it gave a sense of difference. If at moments it was frightening, requiring an effort to put down the conflagrationary imagination, it also augmented the touch of life. This was not a dare with nature. This was nature.”
I'll read John McPhee on any subject. So glad I don't live in Alaska, and so glad I read this book. Fantastic perspective of the land and the deeply curious and strong people who inhabit it. -
The Country lies around the upper Yukon River. The book induced aching for it. This one work teaches more about Alaska than any other source I know: Statehood demeaned Alaska, the Native Claims Settlement Act made a well-intentioned wreck, and the pipeline contorted it in good and bad ways that will prove insignificant over time. Most of all, the book made clear how painful the federal government's interference is to "whites and Indians alike" of The Country.
-
I read this book in the mid-80's. I was encouraged to read it by a friend who had lived in Alaska in the early 80's and knew some of the people mentioned in the book. I remember I liked it and found it interesting but I don't remember too much about the details.
-
I know this is practically sacrilegious, but this was my second favorite book I read before I traveled to Alaska in the early 80s. My favorite book was Going to Extremes by Joe McGinniss.
-
The best book I’ve read this year.
-
It's thorough reporting, I guess. As a "read," somewhere vaguely between 1-star and 5-stars. May I add that long before statehood, my family drove up the AlCan Highway when I was 4 and my dad was stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base. I remember several dead bloody wolves that were shot from airplanes hanging up for public display. I remember the little houses of an Athabascan cemetary and a few other things and wish I remembered the Aurora Borealis.
Part I
In places the river is so shallow they have to get out and wade alongside their canoe and kayaks to the next deep water. They catch lots of big fish. There are plenty of grizzlies. Inexperienced bush pilots in the air get confused telling one river from another.
Part II
A committee to move the state capitol from Juneau, far to the southeast, to somewhere more central searches for possible locations. After the book’s publication Willow was identified as the desired new capitol, but history shows that in the last 40 years, due to politics and budgets, the transfer was never made.
Part III
The lifestyles of various extreme backcountry loners and isolated settlers, living as trappers and dog sledders, hunters and fishers. Most living within a wide radius of Circle, Central, and Eagle, all near the Arctic Circle and northeast of Dawson. Lots of survival yarns in a land of self-induced hardships. The narrative circulates among several characters and makes it difficult to recall each one by the time you get back to them. Sort of a precursor to those Life Below Zero/Alaskan Bush People TV series. -
McPhee travels through Alaska, profiling the many, diverse people he meets along the way. Parts of it are dated, especially the extended section discussing possibly relocating the state capital from Juneau. McPhee is a little too sympathetic with some people, especially the gold miners who completely destroy the countryside for very little money, and who behave almost like terrorists. I had to grit my teeth through these long sections. Overall, like everything McPhee has written, it is smooth and engaging. I don't know that it is insightful, but he certainly introduces us to interesting people.
-
McPhee has a remarkable way with words, and this collection of essays about the colorful people, history, and land of Alaska is no exception.
-
it took us almost a year but Zach and I finished it!
-
This was written in 1976-77, so some of that era’s hot-button issues aren’t as hot (maybe), but this is a fascinating in-depth look at Alaska. I’d love to read a follow-up – I know what lands have subsequently been “protected”, and I know they haven’t moved the capital from Juneau, but living in the lower-48, I don’t really know how some of the other issues have been resolved (or if they have been). Once again, McPhee has an amazing ability to show both/all sides of an issue without allowing his personal opinion to cloud the presentation. Occasionally he’ll actually tell you “OK, now I’m giving you my opinion” – but even then, he tempers that by saying he is probably too close to his study subjects to provide an objective viewpoint. My own personal history with Eagle made the last half of the book totally alive for me.
