Posts Tagged ‘Alaska’
Dead Man’s Dancer, by Tom Brennan
Mechele is young, attractive, and looking to cash in on her aesthetic assets when she moves from New Orleans to Alaska in 1994 to earn money for college tuition. Her charms ensnare the affections of three men, and the combined effects of jealously, lust, and greed take a deadly turn in this true crime story.…
Read MoreDreaming Bears, by J. Michael Holloway
Dreaming Bears (208 pages) is the true story of the rare friendship that develops between a young medical student with deep roots in the South and an elderly Indian couple in the wilds of northeast Alaska. In 1961, Mike Holloway, his brother Ted, and a college friend set out from South Carolina to spend the…
Read MoreBad Friday, by Lew Freedman
On March 27, 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake lasting more than five minutes rocked south central Alaska, leveling waterfronts, collapsing bridges, and crumbling landscapes. Bad Friday (265 pages) relives the most powerful quake in North American history, and the ensuing tidal waves that left homes broken, children orphaned, and infrastructure decimated. Yet, from within the…
Read MoreMidnight Sun, Arctic Moon, by Mary Albanese
Midnight Sun, Arctic Moon (216 pages) follows a young upstate New York woman who begins the adventure of a life-time as she moves away from her safe and conventional path. She is unable to resist the excitement and challenge of a chance to become a geological explorer in Alaska, where she maps remote wilderness areas…
Read MoreCold River Spirits, by Jan Harper-Haines
Cold River Spirits (192 pages) is a wryly humorous and inspirational story about a proud Alaska Native family struggling to survive in two worlds. Sam and Louise Harper and their ten children make a soul-grinding transition into a modern white-dominated society where they face bigotry, poverty, and illness. Yet, Louise, the Athabascan matriarch, remains in…
Read MoreHooked! by Leslie Layland Fields
The rousing sea stories are all here: The dramas of near-death battles, the sickening tragedy of lovers and friends lost to the waters – but this is not the whole story. Hooked! (172 pages) represents an extraordinary holistic view of Alaskan fishing: Not just the dying, but the living; not just the obsessive doing of…
Read MoreBering Sea Blues, by Joe Upton
This a gripping memoir of a winter season of crab-fishing in the Bering Sea, filled with scary moments, killer ice, dangerous work, and-for the lucky ones-financial rewards. For others, survival was their reward. Just 25, Joe Upton was the youngest guy aboard when the 104-foot Flood Tide pulled out of Seattle in March 1971 headed…
Read MoreIn Search of the Kuskokwim, by Stephen Spurr
The United States knew relatively little about Alaska prior to the turn of the century when the Klondike Gold Rush was about to attract thousands of stampeders north, many of them spilling over into Alaska as more gold was discovered on the Yukon River and her tributaries. The government had few reliable maps of the…
Read MoreGoing to Extremes, by Joe McGinniss
This is the fourth edition of Going to Extremes (306 pages) a work that always has been controversial in Alaska. Yet, it is an important and highly readable classic work that captures a portrait frozen in time of a raw state in turmoil during the oil boom. McGinnis went north to find out if there…
Read MorePurely Alaska, by Susan Andrews and John Creed
In the immense, road less expanse of the Far North, storytelling has thrived for many generations. Stories range from harrowing survival adventures to tales of other exotic people, places, and cultures. This anthology captures some of these stories as told by rural Alaskans. Purely Alaska (302 pages) is a sequel to Authentic Alaska. The majority of…
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