The Reader's Companion to Alaska

by Alan Ryan

Release Date: April, 1997

Edition: Paperback

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Really whets your appetite

The first couple of stories are the least fun. After that, it's a great compilation. The five-page diary of V. Swanson is worth the price of the book - and as affecting as any Robert Service poem. The compilation is good enough that I have tried to find some of the excerpted books, and will look for more of them. (John Haines's book was pretty good. A co-worker enjoyed it, too.) The acknowledgments at the end are useful.

The Reader's Companion to Alaska

This is a marvelous collection of essays written about life and travel in Alaska during the past 100 years. It has lots of well-known contributors: John McPhee, Ann Morrow Lindburgh, John Muir, Charles Kuralt, et al. But almost every piece, even from the most obscure writer, had me mesmerized. Perhaps the most haunting tale was a reprint of the diary entries from a man known only as "V. Swanson," who perished in a cabin in the wilderness in 1917.

I was fascinated by the stories of daredevils doing unbelievably brave and crazy things: climbing through ice caves buried within glaciers where the climbers literally had to inhale in order to squeeze through, knowing a shift in the ice could kill them all at any moment...climbing the face of Denali in winter, losing toes to frostbite...coming face to face with a grizzly who smashed in the window of a tiny cabin. Being decidedly NOT a daredevil myself, I would get most of the way through each of these stories scratching my head as to the motivation of these people. Generally, by the end of each story, I understood what made them tick. Reading these essays has made me feel life in Suburbia is just a little too boring, too timid, too soft.