Posts Tagged ‘Biography’
Going 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 MoreThe Accidental Adventurer, by Barbara Washburn
Barbara Washburn never set out to become a mountaineering pioneer, but she wasn’t content to be a stay-at-home wife, either. In 1947, defying social convention, Washburn became the first woman to climb Alaska’s Mt. McKinley. Accidental Adventures (192 pages) chronicles her journeys with her husband, Bradford Washburn, on other expeditions to Alaska, the Grand Canyon,…
Read MoreSurviving the Island of Grace, by Leslie Leyland Fields
Surviving the Island of Grace (352 pages) is a powerfully rendered story of a twenty-year-old newlywed transplanted from New Hampshire to a remote island in the immense Gulf of Alaska. Here, she must learn to live communally with her new family in primitive conditions without running water, electricity, or contact with the outside world. Even…
Read MoreSaving for the Future, by David Rose
David Rose became the first director of the Alaska Permanent Fund, playing a crucial role in managing the multi-billion dollar savings account created by voters after the discovery of oil. Saving for the Future (254 pages) is his account of the formative days of the fund and the inner workings of a truly unique institution.…
Read MoreMoments Rightly Placed, by Ray Hudson
Along a thousand-mile chain of treeless and windswept islands, Unalaska is perched at the end of the world, or, as some prefer to say, the beginning. In 1964, Ray Hudson, 22, landed in Unalaska village with a brand-new college degree, eager to teach. The Aleuts had seen many outsiders who had come but seldom stayed…
Read MoreBoom Town Boy, by Jack de Yonge
This is the witty, ironic, and deliciously outspoken coming-of-age memoir of Jack de Yonge set in Fairbanks, Alaska–a once thriving little mining town slowly dying in the remote center of the vast territory in 1934. As Jack’s dad liked to say, no matter what direction you went out of town, you soon arrived in Nowhere.…
Read MoreKay Fanning’s Alaska Story, by Kay Fanning and Katherine Field Stephen
In 1965, Kay Woodruff Field, 38, a newly divorced former debutante once described as the “Grace Kelly of Chicago,” loaded her three children into a Buick station wagon and headed north to start a fresh life in Alaska. Little did she know that she would became the most influential woman in Alaska. Alaska Story (…
Read MoreChips from the Chopping Block, by Jay Hammond
In this memoir Chips from the Chopping Block(192 pages), a sequel to the immensely popular autobiography, Tales of Alaska’s Bushrat Governor, former governor Jay Hammond spins more delightful yarns about the fascinating people and humorous situations he has encountered from one end of Alaska to the other, from wild tales about life in the Bush to…
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