Alaskan Travels

Thirty years ago, celebrated American writer Edward Hoagland, in his early fifties and already with a dozen acclaimed books under his belt, had a choice: a midlife crisis or a midlife adventure. He chose the adventure. Pencil and notebook at the ready, Hoagland set out to explore and write about one of the last truly wild territories remaining on the face of the earth: Alaska. From the Arctic Ocean to the Kenai Peninsula, the backstreet bars of Anchorage to the Yukon River, Hoagland traveled the real Alaska from top to bottom. Here he documents not only the flora and fauna of Americas last frontier, but also the extraordinary people living on the fringe. On his journey he chronicles the lives of an astonishing and unforgettable array of prospectors, trappers, millionaire freebooters, drifters, oilmen, Eskimos, Indians, and a remarkably kind and capable frontier nurse named Linda. In his foreword, novelist Howard Frank Mosher describes Edward Hoaglands memoir as the best book ever written about Americas last best place. In the tradition of Twains Life on the Mississippi and Jonathan Rabins Old Glory, with a beautiful love story at its heart, this is an American masterpiece from a writer hailed by the Washington Post as the Thoreau of our times.