Koviashuvik: Making a Home in the Brooks Range

by Sam Wright

Release Date: October, 1997

Edition: Paperback

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Just plain annoying

I didn't like this book at all.

The prose, as noted in other reviews here, is weird -- like an endless entry in a Bad Hemingway Contest.

There's relatively little sense of what it's like, day by day, to live a subsistence lifestyle in the Brooks Range.

Wright seems to take the attitude that he's morally and intellectually superior to people who don't live as he does -- people still swimming in the mainstream of society.

And, it's worth noting, his lifestyle in the Brooks Range is altogether dependent on products from the material culture he professes to disdain. As he mentions at one point, the necessities are a gun, a knife, and an ax. Plus (as he doesn't mention) a Bush plane to bring in the mail and supplies, and check up on him and his wife from time to time.

But, in the end, I think it's his faux-Hemingway prose that offends me most. Here's my own nomination for a passage that is really stupid, yes, it is, it is really stupid:

"It is a disturbing thing not to know. When you want to know it is disturbing not to know. Even though there are some things we do not want to know, like what our children taste like boiled."

Stan Jones
Anchorage, Alaska

A Journey through time

Sam Wright takes us to Kovishutok and his Koviashuvik through a prose that at first was halting in its simplicity. As one reads on, as it is clear one reviewer did not, the lithe of the language carries the story telling of native speach and perceptions. I have lived through this evolution of myths and new myths, but seldom have I read an odessy that contains insight, pathos, empathy, and as an aside, a love story with Sam's wife Billie. The Brooks range and Alaska come alive, are described in brillant detail, and historicaly chronicalized. I am a little closer to Koviashuvik in my own life for having read this book.