2 comments about Aleutian Adventure.

1. As a fourth grade teacher in the central California foothills, I am always looking for nonfiction titles with high interest for my classroom. A friend bought this book from Barry Tessman's widow and I immediately ordered a copy. We study Explorers and Geographers as part of our 4th grade curriculum and this book leads into a great discussion about modern day exploring. Pictures and maps are easy to read, text and font grade-appropriate, natural history and wildlife pictures very appealing.



2. This is not a flawless book, by any means. The author dumbs the writing down just a little too much for a suggested audience of "Ages 10 & up," the book shifts randomly from past to present tense, and there's at least one paragraph that's repeated almost word for word more than once.
   But, that said, it's one of the ONLY books about the Aleutian Islands, and as far I can tell, is the ONLY book period about kayaking along them. For that alone, it's worth a lot.
   One of my dreams is to kayak from Anchorage, Alaska to Russia, along the Aleutian peninsula and the Aleutian Islands, and in my research for this trip I've come across very few books on the topic. My wife found this one for me.
   Not only does this book contain some beautiful photos (by Barry Tessman, R.I.P), but it gives a good idea of the dangerousness of the waters, of the area's history, of the general terrain, and of the preparations neccesary for such a trip.
   It's a quick read, but for those in love with Alaska or this area in particular, it will haunt you for days.

4 comments about CloudDancer's Alaskan Chronicles.

1. Absolutely captures the spirit of bush flying in our great state- Seems absurd, but all too true, and part of why lots of us wouldn't want to fly anywhere else. CloudDancer has almost as big and well-deserved a following for his writing as Gwennie's does for their reindeer sausage. Want to know more... Buy It!



2. As one who started his professional flying career in the Alaskan Arctic, and finished out as a Sled Driver in Kotzebue, I can't begin to tell you the memories that these stories bring back. And the thing is, they're all true. Same characters, same airplanes, same stuff still happening up there every day. Kotzebue is a Third World Country with a zip code, and for those of us who figured out how to survive it, it's one of the most amazing and fun places to fly on the planet.
   
   From the new pilot thinking of taking the commercial path in Alaska bush flying, to us grizzled old farts who somehow survived all the years and all the thousands of hours of bad weather and shoddy equipment, this book is a must read. Hidden in the humor is a treasure chest of how-to-do weather flying and techniques for the novice Alaska flyer to draw from, and an intimate look at the native people of Alaska and what their world is really like.



3. . . . should you read the Chronicles?
   
   You betcha, is my vote.
   
   As you can see from the other reviews, pilots love these yarns. But anybody with the slightest interest in Bush Alaska and its larger-than-life characters, climate, and country will love the Chronicles, too.
   
   Besides being a professional pilot with many thousands of hours in his logbook, Clouddancer is a soulful raconteur and a born storyteller. The best of these stories are people stories, and Clouddancer understands people, which is the most important thing in a writer.
   
   That said, you have to make some allowances.
   
   For one thing, as a writer, Clouddancer makes a great Bush pilot. By which I mean, he brings much enthusiasm and passion to his writing, but not-so-much polish (although we're working on that -- I'm his unofficial coach/consultant/cheerleader). So don't expect the kind of finely honed prose you'd find in an Ernest Hemingway novel (although there are comparable quantities of liquor and sex).
   
   Also, about half of these stories are extremely technical accounts of various situations that come up in flying, both Bush and air-carrier. They'll be nearly incomprehensible to non-pilots, and perhaps not particularly interesting for those not into flying, per se.
   
   But these are quibbles. I give the Chronicles 5 stars because they are, in total, really great Alaska flying books, of which there are far too few.
   
   Stan Jones
   One-time amateur Kotzebue Bush pilot, as well as author of the Nathan Active mystery series, which is set in a fictional Alaskan Eskimo village modeled on Kotzebue, where Clouddancer cut his Bush-flying teeth



4. A very good read. And while I've never flown in the Arctic, personal experiences of similar nature in various other parts of the world made me feel right at home in learning about those little problems (being just a "little" too heavy for take off, needing that one part so desperately for your airplane, even polar bear attacks) that seem to plague professional aviators everywhere. Written in an easy-to-read, engaging, style. Well done.
   This is Your Captain Speaking: A Common Sense Manual for Keeping Your Wings Level

1 comments about Rie Munoz: Portrait of Alaska : A Thirty-Year Retrospective of Serigraphs, Lithographs, Posters, Reproductions.

1. This is a wonderful coffee table type of book which covers the artist's Alaskan watercolors that have been reproduced in prints, posters or as serigraphs. The works shown cover thrity years from 1966 to 1995. In total there are 335 full color prints covered. The book also contains a well written biography of the artist with photos of her at work over the years. If you are a Munoz fan you will love this book. Highly recommended and well worth the price.

No comments about Alaska, Annual Travel Issue: The Alaska We Love, February 2008 Issue.

2 comments about Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay.

1. A fine little book about Lituya Bay, a stunningly beautiful nook of sea, ice, rock and rainforest just north of Glacier Bay Alaska on the pacific coast in southeast Alaska. The bay is south of Yakutat and Dry Bays and is a remote part of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The Bay has quite a story to tell and Fradkin does a good job of laying out the human/nature interactions that have gone on in this place. Fradkin breaks the narrative down into Place, Tlingits, Russians, French, Americans and his own experience with Lituya Bay, then proceeds to tell tales of misadventure. The bay itself is typical southeast Alaska rainforest with a heavy influence from the pacific, and has a history of exploration, short-lived colonization, natives, mining, hermits and fishermen. Mix this with its precipitous topography, glaciers and its location over an active fault and you have quite a tale of nature and culture to tell.
   
   The Bay has taken a lot of human life over the years due to its peculiar physiography and the fact that it is on the fearweather fault. Not only is its entrance treacherous, but every so often when the fault slips, great amounts of rock can potentially fall into the almost vertical shoreline of the east end of the bay. This can cause massive amounts of seawater to displace in seconds and the effects on the bay and its island can be catastrophic. In 1958 the earth shook violently unleashing a massive wave from the back of the bay. The deforestation on the mountainside reached the 1740 ft. level, the highest ever recorded. The harrowing tale of survival the fisherman in the bay at the time tell I will save for Fradkin.
   
   The entrance to the bay has claimed many more lives over the centuries, and the Tlingit, the French, the Russians and Americans all have their tales of death and peril in Lituya Bay. Fradkin estimates a ship a year since 1950 has gone down in the entrance, mostly because of the dangerous tides and breakers. He does a good job of relating these tales, and then tells of his own experiences in the bay. The writing style is annoying at first, but Fradkin seems to find his voice about halfway through. The book is well researched and includes a good bibliography with a wide variety of sources. Fradkin has a journalism background, and does not describe the bay in scientific terms, although he does provide the relevant facts. If you are looking for a scientific narrative this is not it. It is more an environmental history of a specific locale, a narrative through which historic accounts of misadventure unfold in the never ending drama of man and nature in southeast Alaska. It's a fascinating and quick read, full of miscellaneous historical facts, as well as the broader context of Lituya Bay in Alaskan history, I recommend it.



2. On About.com, I said the following about this book:
   
   This dark, impressionistic exploration of landscape and culture in America's most dangerous place is the heart of Fradkin's "earthquake trilogy." In Lituya Bay, nature is stark and the human presence always precarious. In this book is no comforting gloss of scientific detachment. Even the book's geologists feel the chill along the spine, and the ghosts of the bay, witnesses to repeated catastrophe, reach surprisingly far into our world.
   
   Knowing geology can be informative, but no less unsettling. Given an aerial photo of Lituya Bay and its location on a world tectonic map, one can spot its geologic hazards in minutes, even moments, and summarize them thus: It is a fjord, guarded at its mouth by boulders of an intact terminal moraine, threatened at its head by calving glaciers and oversteepened rock faces that lie in the path of a plate-bounding transpressional fault. The geographer will add that the bay has strong tides and sits in a subarctic setting between the world's highest coastal range and one of its stormiest seas. Made for shipwreck on the outside, landslide tsunamis within and deadly weather the year round, Lituya Bay may be the most dangerous place in the world that is not Antarctica or an erupting volcano.
   
   I visited Lituya Bay one calm day in June 1976 aboard a research vessel, an exhilarating but tense experience. The bay's entire shore was shorn of trees for tens of meters above the high-tide line, and at the bay's head a colossal swath of mountainside some 600 meters high was similarly bare. A landslide there in 1958, caused by a major earthquake, had pushed a gigantic wave over that mountain's shoulder and out the bay. Find Lituya Bay in Google Earth and you'll see the marks today. My ship seemed very small there beneath the steep walls of ice and stone. A full-grown Alaskan brown bear on the rocky slope looked the size of a mite.
   
   I'm saying that I was ready for hair-raising reading with Philip Fradkin's account in "Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay." It is the middle book in his earthquake trilogy that includes the California-centered books "Magnitude 8" and "The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906." Their common theme is that the perils of a place make their mark on the peoples who live there. The geologic hazards of California are dire enough, but Fradkin sought out an even more extreme example.
   
   Geologists expected something like the great wave of 1958, but it and several others in the previous century were surprises to those in and around Lituya Bay. The native Tlingits considered the bay a bad place, visiting only seasonally for hunting and occasional warfare. A water-centered people, the pre-European Tlingits had a horror of death by drowning, which interrupts the soul's cycle of cremation and rebirth, giving rise to baleful beings called Land Otter Men. Lituya Bay had many, and when angry they were known to shake the bay and flush it clean of living things. . . .
   
   Fradkin visited Lituya Bay in person, "with great trepidation," in the summer of 1980. He found himself haunted by gruesome shades of the past and by the animus of the place in the form of a persistent grizzly bear, never seen but evident by its sounds and smell. The aftermath of his visit included uncanny encounters with the Tlingit spirit and, near his home on the San Andreas fault, the apparition of a Land Otter Man. One gets a whiff of Coleridge's sea-changed Ancient Mariner in Fradkin's epilogue, and a sense that nature is not only mightier than we imagine, but mightier than we can imagine. Of all of Fradkin's cautionary tales in his earthquake trilogy, those in "Wildest Alaska" cut closest to the heart as well as the brain.

No comments about Alaska: The Visual Feast.

1 comments about Islands of the Seals: The Pribilofs (Alaska Geographic).

1. Do You Know Where the Pribilofs Are?

   If you don't, then you should! The Pribilof Islands are two small isles in the Bearing Sea. They are known as the Islands of the Seals because of the large population of seals which congregate there. Many parts of the Island are wildlife sanctuaries for seals. But a modern Western/Aleut community thrives (relatively speaking) in these Islands roughly halway between Alaska and Russia.

   For years these islands were used as dumping areas for furtive captains who would abandon oil barrels- mostly empty- and other industrial container garbage when nobody was looking. Fortunately recent years have seen far more stringent monitoring of the environment and the beginnings of very effective clean-up efforts.

   But while the Pribilofs have their masses of seals and has a grim history of this ugly pollution, it is entering the 21st century as a cleaner, more cherished area with a robust local community who pride themselves on their special islands and their clean-up efforts. And these islands are very special indeed...

   In this unique Alaska Geographic release one can see many pictures and read about the beautiful coastal boroughs and abundant sea life of the Pribilofs. While most people get on a plane and fly off to some impossible to spell foreign region for adventure travel, the Aleutian Islands and the Pribilofs continue to exist mostly off the beaten path, and are some of the most exotic, diverse, and richly rewarding islands imaginable, right here in the USA. It's just a matter of perspective and where you look.

   This book is usually available through Amazon, but may take a few weeks to ship. If you like seals or unusual coastal areas, take a look!

   And for those of you who surf... here's another zone with some potential. If you look at the excellent maps of the islands you'll find in this book, you will see a great deal of potential for decent conditions on any swell, tide, and wind. If its onshore on one side of the island, a few minutes later you can find yourself in offshore conditions on the other side. Road access and lodging looks to be quite available! There is a picture or two of possible surf zones! But this is rugged territory dominated by the seals! Just look at the cover- did you think that man invented surfing... Ha! (*The cover pictures a number of seals frolicking about in a glassy green left-hander!)

1 comments about Mountain Bike Alaska: 49 Trails in the 49th State.

1. This book offers fairly complete ride and trail assessments of some popular and not-so-popular trail rides, mainly in SouthCentral Alaska. Topo maps coincide with trail and ride descriptions, although they could show a bit more detail. There are not many books on the market on Alaska riding possibibilities, although there are some new Alaska web sites appearing, so having this book as a resource would be a good idea.

1 comments about Alaska/Yukon/Arctic Light: Gifts of the Wild.

1. Last week I was in Washington D.C., where I went to the National Zoo. I saw all sorts of animals, including bears, wolves, seals, and various other animals. What I really liked, however, was that I got to spend some time just watching the animals as they went about their day. It was very intimate; seeing how each animal behaved and recognizing that each one had their own consciousness. It was sad to leave, I wanted to continue learning and watching these magnificent animals.
   
   Well, what a pleasant surprise when I arrived home and found the photography book Alaska/Yukon/Arctic Light: Gifts of the Wild. Captured in stunning color by photographer Kathleen M.K. Menke, here were images of northern animals and their environment in as intimate setting as I had just experienced, although in this book all wildlife images are taken exclusively in their natural, wild settings of the Far North, where clearly there is no separation between the landscape and the individual wild spirit of creature. Slowly going over the 175+ original photos I was once again able to see a closer, more personal side to the animals and their northern environment.
   
   Celebrating the importance and nuances light has in the Far North, this book takes a close-up look at how life changes and revolves around the sun through the seasons. Animal lovers, biologists, environmentalists, and lovers of the outdoors will cherish this excellent photography book. Like Kathleen's other book, "Haines for All Seasons: Northern Exposures from Alaska Reflecting Our Bond to the Land and Each Other," her newest photography book is a must have. See the Far North like you have never before, through the lens of an expert photographer and animal lover!
   
   Peter N. Jones
   New Great Books
   http://newgreatbooks.blogspot.com

No comments about The ABC's of Reading Alaska's Small Rivers and Streams.