Alaskan Travels: Far-Flung Tales of Love and Adventure

Description

Thirty years ago, celebrated American writer Edward Hoagland, in his early fifties and already with a dozen acclaimed books under his belt, had a choice: a midlife crisis or a midlife adventure. He chose the adventure. Pencil and notebook at the ready, Hoagland set out to explore and write about one of the last truly wild territories remaining on the face of the earth: Alaska. From the Arctic Ocean to the Kenai Peninsula, the backstreet bars of Anchorage to the Yukon River, Hoagland traveled the "real" Alaska from top to bottom. Here he documents not only the flora and fauna of America's last frontier, but also the extraordinary people living on the fringe. On his journey he chronicles the lives of an astonishing and unforgettable array of prospectors, trappers, millionaire freebooters, drifters, oilmen, Eskimos, Indians, and a remarkably kind and capable frontier nurse named Linda. In his foreword, novelist Howard Frank Mosher describes Edward Hoagland's memoir as "the best book ever written about America's last best place." In the tradition of Twain's Life on the Mississippi and Jonathan Rabin's Old Glory, with a beautiful love story at its heart, this is an American masterpiece from a writer hailed by the Washington Post as "the Thoreau of our times."

Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books, including the travel memoirs African Calliope and Notes from the Century Before, the essay collections Walking the Dead Diamond River and The Tugman's Passage, and the novels Cat Man and Seven Rivers West.He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world writing for a number of national magazines, including Harper's and Esquire. He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, and taught at many American colleges and universities. He is a native New Yorker, who now divides his time between Martha's Vineyard and his farmhouse in Sutton, Vermont.

To read two pages of Hoagland at random is to know immediately that you are in the hands of a supremely tough-minded man and a man of perfect honesty. Hoagland inserts historical facts about the towns and cities he visited, and he provides plenty of appealing natural descriptions of a wondrous landscape. A pleasing combination of personal essays and reflections, a love story and a naturalist's view of one of the last unspoiled lands. --Kirkus Reviews ...The best book to date by a writer I regard as one of America's very best, and quite possibly its most original, since Thoreau himself. --Howard Frank Mosher from his foreword to Alaskan Travels A writer born, a writer obsessed. --Alfred Kazin Alaskan Travels is much more than a travel book. It is the chronicle of a love affair, with a powerful landscape and a powerful woman- a wonderful double portrait. --Paul Theroux Edward Hoagland is a natural. His essays flow like running water, pure and clear. --Studs Terkel Edward Hoagland is a strong, solid writer with a splendid feel for the intricacy, queerness and stubborn pertinacity of life. He is also, so far as i know, the best essayist working in our perishing republic. --Edward Abbey He's at his best...when he circles a subject from many vantage points, teasing and digressing, piling up gorgeously angled syntaxes and frank admissions...hallmarks of a true essayist... it's good to have this courageous account...contemplating the landscape of old age and mortality. --Phillip Lopate, The New York Review of Books (of Sex and the River Styx) Hoagland has captured the restless adventuresomeness of our frontiersmen, and the riot of nature in its unspoiled glory. --John Irving Hoagland's genius is being in touch with both the natural world and his own life... He is that rare animal, an unpedantic essayist, and like his greatest predecessors he has found a way to turn self-consciousness into a fine art. --Paul Theroux Literally, we are plunged and immersed in the Yukon or Yemen or Belize and made not only to experience it and hear about it but to absorb and understand it. --Wallace Stegner No contemporary essayist sifting through his own experience can match the unadomed clarity of Hoagland's voice. --The Los Angeles Times One of the very best writers of his generation. --Saul Bellow The best essayist of my generation. --John Updike The Thoreau of our time, an essayist so personal, so sharp-eyed and deep-sighted, so tender and tough, lyrical and elegiac, as to transmute a simple stroll into a full-blown mystical experience. --Washington Post Book World Hoagland has captured the restless adventuresomeness ofour frontiersmen, and the riot of nature in its unspoiled glory. --John Irving