Borealis
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
2021
ISBN: 9781566896191
"In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan writes about a solitary summer visit to Alaska, observing glaciers, shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and herself. As she studies her surroundings, the myth of Alaska-excitement, exploration, possibility-is complicated by boredom and isolation, and her attempts to set down place in writing are suffused with nostalgia and anxiety. The first title commissioned for the Spatial Species series, Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Sabatini Sloan's experiences as a queer woman contemplating her Blackness in the wilderness and in the mysteries of art-making. The Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming"-- Provided by publisher.
Arctic : life inside the Arctic Circle
Claudia Martin
2021
ISBN: 9781838860479
To crack the world open : solitude, Alaska, and a dog named Woody
Ward Serrill
2021
ISBN: 9781954854185
From a remote cabin in the rugged rainforest of the Alaskan wilderness, where the untamed landscape tumbles into the ocean, a remarkable yellow Labrador retriever named Woody helped an exile from corporate America seek a fierce freedom.
Buffalo soldiers in Alaska : Company L, Twenty-Fourth Infantry
Brian G. Shellum
2021
ISBN: 9781496228444
"Brian G. Shellum tells the story of Company L, which served in Skagway, Alaska, and was one of the two companies added to the all-Black Twenty-Fourth U.S. Infantry Regiment after war was declared on Spain in April 1898"-- Provided by publisher.
Northern exposure : a cultural history
Michael Samuel
2021
ISBN: 9781538117446
"This book revisits and celebrates the cultural legacy of the cult television series Northern Exposure. With a focus on its production history, fan culture, and individual episodes, it reveals the show's profound influence and argues its status as the prototype contemporary television series"-- Provided by publisher.
A thousand trails home : living with caribou
Seth Kantner
2021
ISBN: 9781594859700
"Firsthand account of a life spent hunting, studying, and living alongside caribou that reveals the fragile, intertwined lives of people and animals surviving through sweeping changes in the Alaskan Arctic"-- Provided by publisher.
Sitting at their feet : = gookwaii eeghai dhidii : a young Gwich'in Athabascan's memoir
by Matt Gilbert ; edited by Agnes Portalewska and Debbie Miller
2021
ISBN: 9781942078425
"A Gwich’in Athabascan man’s coming-of-age story in the mountains of northern Alaska, during his people’s shift into the modern world. Starting with his childhood, where he sits at the feet of the last traditional Elders tribe tell old stories. They raise and inspire him, as he enters his tumultuous yet adventuresome teen and early adult years. Travelling many places, he searches for the best education. He returns and finishes college at home and becomes a community leader among his Alaska Native people. He travels the reservations in the states to gather support for them and takes up his Elders’ fight for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the new global crisis of climate change. As he nears his 30th birthday, life calms down and he goes back to school. He returns to his village and translates the stories of his now-deceased-Gwich’in-Elders with his grandfather for his Masters Thesis. Thus, sitting at their feet and listening to their stories once again, as a grown and seasoned leader, yet still humbled by them."--Publisher's description.
Cold Mountain path : the ghost town decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska 1938-1983
Tom Kizzia
2021
ISBN: 9781736755815
"In this history of life in an isolated ghost town, bestselling Alaska author Tom Kizzia unfolds a deeply American saga of renunciation and renewal. The spirit of Alaska in the old days -- impetuous, free-wheeling, and bounty-blessed -- lived on in the never-quite-abandoned mining town of McCarthy. While the new state boomed in the pipeline era, cagey old-timers and young back-to-the-landers forged a rough wilderness community that lived by its own rules. As the T'ang Dynasty mountain poet Han Shan wrote, "If your heart was like mine, you'd get it and be right here." The Wrangell Mountains developed a reputation as a hermit kingdom, "contrary and self-reliant, where settlers tougher than the rest of us salvaged, in post-apocalyptic fashion, the rusted relics of a profligate past." But history had its eyes on McCarthy. Pressures grew to improve access for tourists and speculators, and to cordon off the wild surroundings in a national park. Here is the story, hopeful but haunted, of those latter-day pioneers -- from the afternoon the last copper train left the valley, to the icy morning when a man with a rifle brought the lost decades to an end. Cold Mountain Path is loaded up with vivid accounts of heroes and lovers, crackpots and con artists, feuding prospectors and daring bush pilots. An outlaw who became Alaska's iconic art-museum sourdough. A secret government plan to explode an atomic bomb. A young Harvard graduate who followed the path of ascetic Chinese poetry into marriage with a mountain man. A loner who decided Nature would be better off with all of them gone. And tying the half-century together, the life story of a cantankerous and idealistic homesteader, Jim Edwards, who lived in the valley longer than any of them, "the ghost in Alaska's rear-view mirror." Beyond the whimsical reminiscing of old-timers, the book is also a serious environmental history: a meditation on ghost towns, a funhouse-mirror reflection of modern Alaska, and an on-the-ground recounting of the conservation battle to create the country's largest national park."--Publisher website.
A line of driftwood : the Ada Blackjack story
Diane Glancy
2021
ISBN: 9781933527215
"In September 1921, a young Inupiat woman named Ada Blackjack traveled to Wrangel Island, 200 miles off the Arctic Coast of Siberia, as a cook and seamstress, along with four professional explorers. The expedition did not go as planned. When a rescue ship finally broke through the ice two years later, she was the only survivor. Diane Glancy discovered Blackjack's diary in the Dartmouth archives and created a new narrative based on the historical record and her vision of this woman's extraordinary life. She tells the story of a woman facing danger, loss, and unimaginable hardship, yet surviving against the odds where four "experts" could not. Beyond the expedition, the story examines Blackjack's childhood experiences at an Indian residential school, her struggles as a mother and wife, and the faith that enabled her to survive alone on a remote island in the Arctic Sea. Glancy's creative telling of this heroic tale is a high mark in her award-winning hybrid investigations of suffering, identity, and Native American history"-- Provided by publisher.
Dark traffic
Joan Naviyuk Kane
2021
ISBN: 9780822966623
Ragged coast, rugged coves : labor, culture, and politics in southeast Alaska canneries
Diane J. Purvis
2021
ISBN: 9781496225887
"Ragged Coast, Rugged Coves explores the untold story of cannery workers in southeast Alaska from the Russian era through the Cold War, particularly how making a living was pitted against the economic realities of the day"-- Provided by publisher.
The bear doesn't know : life and wonder in bear country
Paul Schullery
2021
ISBN: 9781496226068
"At once a stirring adventure tale, a candid and often hilarious personal memoir, an offbeat natural history, and a smart literary chronicle, Paul Schullery's The Bear Doesn't Know is a bear-lover's book of wonders-rich in the joy, beauty, and inspiration found during a life well-lived in bear country"-- Provided by publisher.
Everything never comes your way : poems
Nicole Stellon O'Donnell
2021
ISBN: 9781597099240
"In her third collection, Nicole Stellon O'Donnell explores the landscapes of memory, argument, and wilderness. These poems deconstruct memoir, dig at the roots of philosophical argumentation, and critique the role of the poet as an observer of the natural world. From manicured baseball fields to the debate podium, from the lobby of the public pool to the hallowed Alaskan cabin where John Haines once sat down to write, these poems push against the notion that the solitary self is the arbiter of truth"-- Provided by publisher.
The Harriman Alaska expedition of 1899 : scientists, naturalists, artists and others document America's last frontier
John J. Michalik
2021
ISBN: 9781476684239
"In 1899, one of America's wealthiest men assembled an interdisciplinary team of experts--many of whom would become legendary in their fields--to join him, entirely at his expense, on a voyage to the largely unknown territory of Alaska. The Harriman Expedition remains unparalleled in its conception and execution. This book follows the team closely: where they went, what they did, and what they learned--including finding early evidence of glacial retreat, assessing the nature and future of Alaska's natural resources, making important scientific discoveries, and collecting an astonishing collection of specimens. A second thread involves the lives and accomplishments of the members of the party, weaving biographical strands into the narrative of the journey and the personal experiences they shared. This is the first comprehensive, scholarly treatment of the Harriman Alaska Expedition since the 1980s. It features the diaries, letters home, and post-Expedition writings, including unpublished autobiographies, generated by the members of the party"-- Provided by publisher.
One headlight : a memoir
Matt Caprioli
2021
ISBN: 9781737510420
"Matt Caprioli never belonged in Alaska: too gay, too bookish, a faltering vegetarian. As a spiritual and sensitive young boy, he's raised by the exuberant and radiant but deeply impractical Abby Henry, who doesn't view his baptism in a horse trough or machete marks on their new apartment door as peculiar. Abby works as a baker in Anchorage, so the two leave Lazy Mountain each morning at 3:30am to drive through single-digit weather in a rickety, church-donated Mustang with no passenger window, no snow tires, and one headlight. Lacking money and direction, Caprioli nonetheless adores his mother and the world they share. As a young man, Caprioli leaves Alaska to chase his dream of writing in Manhattan, along the way working as a journalist and sex worker. His bond with his mother is tested as Caprioli tries to forget where he comes from. But when Abby falls ill at 53, Caprioli returns to Anchorage to care for her, and is forced to reckon with the true meaning of home. In telling his story, Caprioli captures the love and joy of our deepest bonds, of the myths and hopes surrounding America's largest state, and the momentous power of a quiet drive with those we love."--Amazon.com
Inside passage : a memoir
Keema Waterfield
2021
ISBN: 9781950584567
A mother-daughter love story of resilience and hope against the odds. Keema Waterfield grew up chasing music with her twenty-year-old mother on the Alaskan folk festival circuit, two small siblings in tow. Summers they traveled by ferry and car, sharing the family tent with a guitar, cello, and fiddle. Adrift with a revolving cast of musicians, drunks, stepdads, and one man with a gun, Keema yearned for a place to call home. Preferably with heat and flushing toilets. Trying to understand the absence of her pot-dealing father, she is drawn deeper into her mother's past instead. Publisher's description.