I grew up in a wilderness cabin in Alaska, surrounded by more wild animals than humans. For many years, I worked in the heavily male-dominated Alaskan fishing industry. I still work as a scientist in rural Alaska. I care passionately about the place, and the truthful stories written about it by people with deep roots and diverse backgrounds here.
This book is the most gripping and true-to-life tale I’ve ever read about growing up in the wilderness. As a young boy in northern Alaska, the author learned as much from wolves as from his few friends.
Mesmerizingly beautiful, frightening, and touching, this book made me cry when I finished it.
Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what any of us has known: Inhuman cold, the taste of rancid salmon shared with shivering sled dogs, hunkering in a sod igloo while blizzards moan overhead. But this is the only world Cutuk Hawcley has ever known. Born and raised in the Arctic, he has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. And yet, though he idolizes the indigenous hunters who have taught him how to survive, when he travels to the nearby Inupiaq village, he is jeered and pummeled by the native children for being white. When he…
This book tells of Indigenous resistance to white colonizers in northern Alaska and the fierceness of a mother’s love as she fights to save her daughter from kidnapping.
Lily Tuzroyluk’s voice is fresh and utterly compelling. She writes of a place she knows. This book both broke my heart and thrilled me.
In the spring of 1893, arctic Alaska is devastated by smallpox. Kayaliruk knows it is time to light the funeral pyres and leave their home. With her surviving children, she packs their dog sled and they set off to find family. Kayaliruk wakes with a bleeding scalp and no memory of the last day. Her daughter was stolen by Yankee whalers, her sons say. They begin chasing the ship, through arctic storms, across immeasurable distances, slipping into the Yankee whalers' town on Herschel Island, and to the enemy shores of Siberia. Ibai, an African American whaler, grew up in New…
I loved this book because it told the inner story of Southeast Alaska, a place where I grew up, a story I had never truly known. Tragic yet also easily relatable, the book tells of a family both deeply injured by and standing up against institutionalized racism. This is the Alaska that tourists do not see but that is powerfully, achingly real.
In the spring, the bear returns to the forest, the glacier returns to its source, and the salmon returns to the fresh water where it was spawned. Drawing on the special relationship that the Native people of southeastern Alaska have always had with nature, Blonde Indian is a story about returning.
Told in eloquent layers that blend Native stories and metaphor with social and spiritual journeys, this enchanting memoir traces the author’s life from her difficult childhood growing up in the Tlingit community, through her adulthood, during which she lived for some time in Seattle and San Francisco, and eventually…
As a kid growing up in Alaska, I daydreamed of venturing into the wilderness alone. I was hooked on the promise of adventure.
This book follows that dream as the author and her partner set off on an astonishing quest to traverse Alaska in homemade boats. Thoughtful, funny, and magical, it’s a tale of true love as well as near-death escapes.
During graduate school, as she conducted experiments on the peculiarly misshapen beaks of chickadees, ornithologist Caroline Van Hemert began to feel stifled in the isolated, sterile environment of the lab. Worried that she was losing her passion for the scientific research she once loved, she was compelled to experience wildness again, to be guided by the sounds of birds and to follow the trails of animals.
In March of 2012 she and her husband set off on a 4,000-mile wilderness journey from the Pacific rainforest to the Alaskan Arctic. Travelling by rowboat, ski, foot, raft and canoe, they explored northern…
I rarely find a book that captures the inner lives of wild animals and the strange, poignant ways they still can shape our human world. For many years, I fished in the waters Eva Saulitis writes of. I know the orca family she describes. Her writing is profoundly moving. I couldn't put it down.
Science entwines with matters of the human heart as a whale researcher chronicles the lives of an endangered family of orcas
Ever since Eva Saulitis began her whale research in Alaska in the 1980s, she has been drawn deeply into the lives of a single extended family of endangered orcas struggling to survive in Prince William Sound. Over the course of a decades-long career spent observing and studying these whales, and eventually coming to know them as individuals, she has, sadly, witnessed the devastation wrought by the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989—after which not a single calf has been…
Knowing next to nothing about fishing, Rosemary McGuire signed on to the crew of the Arctic Storm in Homer, Alaska, looking for money and experience. Cold, hard work, and starkly sexist harassment were what she found. Here is her life story on a fishing boat as the only woman crew member.
This is the story of a woman in a man's world, both an adult coming-of-age tale and a candid look at the Alaskan fishing industry. Anyone who has ever longed to sail in heavy seas will relish her account of working in an ancient profession that has changed remarkably little over the course of human history.
