Why read The Stars, the Snow, the Fire?

Book cover of The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness

Book description

In this wilderness classic, the quintessential Alaskan frontiersman relates his experiences from over twenty years as a hoemsteader. As New York Newsday has said of his work, If Alaska had not existed, Haines might well have invented it.''

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Stars, the Snow, the Fire as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Charles Wohlforth

Author

Haines was best known as a poet, highly respected by other writers but uncompromising and without much commercial success or recognition. This collection of essays in the form of a memoir similarly makes no compromise, dispensing with plot, characters, or even a clear sense of time and geography. Instead, Haines takes the reader deep into the mind of a lone man surviving for decades in the harshest wilderness, thinking, observing, and writing—his own mind. And the writing is so strong, it turns out, that he doesn’t need those usually necessary tools of narrative he pointedly ignores. Instead, we feel the…

From Charles' list on the dark, gritty, beautiful truth of Alaska.