But what I’ll always remember about the book is the tragic story of Cidaq. There is much to love about Alaska, including Michener’s carefully stylized prose, the detail that he paints with the widest brush in all of modern literature, and the way he manages to illustrate the complexity of even the most ancient human social dynamics. Later we meet humans like Tevuk and the benevolent priest Azazruk, but it isn’t for a hundred massive pages that characters with pronounceable names like “Captain Cook” are introduced. Published in 1988, the story opens before the landmass exists, and the characters are given names like “Mastodon,” a mastodon, and “Matriarch,” a battle-ax of an old woolly mammoth.
Is it because he’s too popular? Or because he had help with his painstaking geographical research? The critical disregard doesn’t bother me, though, except that I wish there was someone with whom I could chat about the most recent book I loved, Alaska. “Michener is still, sentence for sentence, writing’s fastest attention grabber.I can’t figure out why James Michener gets such short shrift. “Michener is still, sentence for sentence, writing’s fastest attention grabber.” - The New York Times
“Always the master of exhaustive historical research, Michener tracks the settling of Alaska vividly detailed scenes and well-developed characters.” - Boston Herald The characters that Michener creates are bigger than life.” - Los Angeles Times Book Review Alaska takes the reader on a journey through one of the bleakest, richest, most foreboding, and highly inviting territories in our Republic, if not the world. “Few will escape the allure of the land and people describes. A spellbinding portrait of a human community fighting to establish its place in the world, Alaska traces a bold and majestic saga of the enduring spirit of a land and its people.īONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. As his characters struggle for survival, Michener weaves together the exciting high points of Alaska’s story: its brutal origins the American acquisition the gold rush the tremendous growth and exploitation of the salmon industry the arduous construction of the Alcan Highway, undertaken to defend the territory during World War II. Michener guides us through Alaska’s fierce terrain and history, from the long-forgotten past to the bustling present. In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American frontier, James A.
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