Book reviews
Alaska by James Michener, 1988, Random House
Alaska by James Michener, 1988, Random House I have done it! On July 2, 2017, I posted this on my Facebook page; "Experimenting with the 1980's class online book clubs by reading and reviewing the best sellers of 1988 this summer. If you would care to join the discussion and the experiment, I am starting by reading James Michener's "Alaska". At over 1,000 pages it is going to be quite a journey. " My original plan, nearly 2 years ago, was to tackle this massive book with a strategic summer strike. I picked up a copy at our favorite used book store, Reading Room Books in Wabash, Indiana. It was paperback, so it spread the page length out into the 1100's. "How hard could it be?", I questioned, "After all, I took on the unabridged Les Miserables when I was ten after hearing the Broadway soundtrack." This would be so much easier; I was forty now, had conquered undergrad reading, gained a Master's Degree in Education, written numerous thirty page papers. I was a professional of reading at this point, plus I was a teacher with summer vacation, so I had very little fear of Alaska. Also, I have spent a sizeable amount of time watching Alaskan Bush People, so I'm pretty much an expert on Alaska. I had never read a James Michener book before and I will admit that I took a certain level of arrogance in turning to the first page. All of this is to say, I was as unprepared as the Flatch family in the book, for what was ahead. It is March 18, 2019, the day after my birthday as I write this. On March 17, 2019, newly forty-two year old me reached the last words of the book! I feel like I have climbed Mt Denali and come away with a treasure trove of knowledge in things I did not think I should know anything about. I now can talk at faculty meetings about salmon breeding, plate tectonics, the lifespan of mastodons, the differences between the native tribes of Alaska, pelagic seal hunting, how to cut up whales, how to fly a bush plane through fog, how to hunt walruses, how to prepare to climb Mt. Denali, and more. This book...this book. This novel has driven me to the brink of defeat in a way that no book ever has. It is interesting to think that the reading of this book, mirrors the journeys of those who struggled to survive the brutality of the actual Alaska in the book. This is one of the reasons that I could not put down this book. The book is carved up into twelve long chapters, which are basically twelve different novels about each time period in the history of Alaska. In Alaska, character after character in chapter after chapter, is faced with their own mortality and some undefeatable obstacle that the forbidden arctic world pummels them with. In each case, they either give in and let nature take their life in surrender, or they fight on, attempting to gain a small foothold to survive on. I was not going to let Alaska, the book, defeat me. My daughter would say, "Why don't you just stop reading it?", every time she would hear me sigh before picking it up again. By the way, my daughter was seven when I started reading this. She has literally grown up as I have been stranded in Alaska. I feel like I can finally come home to her, and finish our reading of The Emerald City of Oz. I will throw off my snow boots, my sealskin coat, toss my sack of gold nuggets on the counter, and let her know I have survived the wilderness! Much like the characters in Alaska, of which there are easily one million, I kept wanting to hop a plane or a ship, and get out of Alaska with my dignity in tact. I kept thinking "Why would I live like this, when I have a dozen other 1988 books that I can escape to? Those other books involve sunny beaches, and scandal. Some of them involve demon swords and Mr. Spock. Why I am I sitting it out in Alaska?" The answer is the same for me as it is for the characters in the book, "Because you are here now, and you will either survive this or die trying". I was going to live like John Klope in the book, I was going to keep digging my hole, even if it seemed like I would never find a gold strike. Alaska, the book and the place, is a siren song for the adventurous who want to challenge themselves to see how far they can push their boundaries. I am not saying that reading 1100 pages (although all of the reviews I am reading say 900, which I will fight anyone of them on, as I counted down my last hundred pages from 1000 to 1100) is akin to the sheer lunacy it took to cross on shovel sleds to the goldfields of the Klondike, but it has to be close. There were times that the characters in the book were facing down an avalanche, or a group of drunken sailors, and they had thoughts of giving up. However, the power and majesty of Alaska would draw them on. I felt that way. Whenever I would hit a rough patch while learning how to drive a Caterpillar in order to build a WWII era highway or there was a discussion of seismic science, I would start to drift away. However, Michener recognized my wandering off without a guide, and would throw me a tow line. He would bring me back with the stories of shamanism, Russian history, a mad seal hunting captain named Shransky and his fight against an African American captain named Healey. He drew me into the warmth with the story of Missy, a bicycle journey across the ice, chloroforming street gangs, or the Japanese invasion of Alaska. I was revived every time, and it allowed me to press on into the wilderness of the book. I am absolutely curious, as this was a best seller in 1988, how many people who bought the book actually had the patience to make it all the way through. I am constantly finding copies at used book stores. I think I will post a survey at the end of this to see who made it to the end. We will form a reunion group, and we will meet someday and sing songs of how we struggled, survived, and came out better on the other side. All this being said, I am in love with this book. Maybe it is a case of Stockholm Syndrome, but I feel tied to this book now. This, again, is very much in character of the people and animals in this book. Alaska beats them up time and time again, but they can not leave her. There is something so different and groundbreaking about the region and the book. I have been reading a lot of reviews from 1988 and beyond, and they all speak to some of the same difficulties I had in tackling this book. For one, most of us like stories that have characters we can grow to understand and either sympathize with or detest. Alaska never allows you the opportunity of getting to know much about any of the characters. The book takes you from the geological formation of Alaska to our modern (roughly 1991) political and environmental hold on the area. The characters merely serve to push history forward, all taking space in areas where the previous characters lived before. In fact, if you ask me about the earlier characters from when I started reading this 2 years ago, I will have very little to tell you. I remember of course, the historical figures like Bering, Captain Cook, and Voronov. I would struggle to fill you in on many of the European or Native names spread across the first section. I had originally planned to write all of their names down, keep an online book club, and summarize each section. However, much like in the real Alaska, sometimes to make it through you have to dump the dead weight and push forward. After reading the first and second sections, I knew there was no way I was going to be able to read and live a life outside of this book if I also committed to writing it all down. As I got closer to the end, it occurred to me that perhaps this was Michener's point. The characters that inhabited the land of Alaska were never as important as Alaska itself. It stands to reason, as the first character that we meet IS Alaska. We watch for hundreds of pages as she breaks and forms, breaks and reforms. We watch her mountains and glaciers develop, and we watch her rivers cover the land. The book creates the stage before the actors even arrive. We are taken through a journey of animal life, native life, Russian life, American life and beyond. In all cases, no matter who moves into Alaska, the region remains the central character. She is a land they want to tame that cannot be tamed. Alaska is beautiful and violent. The book shows us the top of the world, but it also does not hide seal killing, native suicide, and bloody accidents. Alaska provides the characters with resources in otters, seals, gold, lumber, defense, and fish, but she also provides instant unexpected death. Perhaps the characters are not as important as the themes of struggle, achievement, failure, loss, gain, love, death, and survival. Michener’s chapters seem to play on the duality of desire; whether it is the Natives vs the Russians or those who want to preserve Alaska vs those from "the lower 48" who want to exploit her. Some characters like Tom Venn even find this duality in themselves and it puts them at odds with former allies and lovers. We also see the theme of continuity present when later generations make call backs to previous characters. Often times, children and grandchildren of former enemies become spouses and business partners. Another theme I savored in the book was the strength and integrity that could be found in the female characters. Michener spends a long time letting us into the lives and struggles of Cidaq, Missy, Flossie, and a school teacher named Kendra to name a few. However, I did grow frustrated that he would eventually give those strong female characters over to melodramatic storylines about love triangles in the tundra. Michener also carries great sympathy for the natives and their struggle to keep one foot in both worlds. He draws us back repeatedly into the idea of native identity in Alaska and the power of shamanism. There are multiple call backs to the spirits that walk the ice, and the mummies that lie eternally under the permafrost. Only the natives truly understand Alaska, but are forced to watch from the sidelines and live with the tragic consequences. There is much to learn from Alaska. I found myself at my local Kroger laughing to myself when I saw a Sockeye Salmon in the freezer. I had just read almost 100 pages based on the life and death of Nerka the fish. Alaska sneaks up on you. I learned about the negative impacts of the Jones Act and the land settlement acts of the natives. I learned about the role of Chinese migrant labor in salmon canning and the fight against Japanese invasion of Alaska in WWII. This is not a topic I have read in many of my history books and will be looking deeper into. In his last chapter Michener hovers around a prediction that Alaska will determine our future. Alaska will become central, either through a Russian takeover by 2030 or an explosion of its volcanoes that have been building up in the Ring of Fire. In 1988, Alaska played a peace-brokering role in dethawing the Cold War, and it was also about to become the home of a young reporter from Idaho named Sarah Palin. A few years after the publishing, The Soviet Union was gone (a fact mentioned in the planning of the Russian Alaska 2030 takeover), the Exxon Valdez, Bridge to Nowhere, and ANWR would take on significance. Another interesting take away from the book is how, in 1988, Michener was imagining a Russia that would slowly rise back to power. The final Russian characters in the book discuss how America would lose its power and its stomach for democracy by 2030. They talk in great length about how Alaska is Russia's birthright and how it was more or less stolen by those who did not speak for all Russians. They agree that Russia will move in secret until 2030 when Americans lose interest in holding Alaska, and then whoever is in charge, communist or not, will use world opinion to regain their territory. This article appeared in the New York Times in 2017, almost 30 years later. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/world/europe/alaska-russia-sale-150.html. As 2030 draws nearer, one can't help but wonder if the fall of the Soviet Union and all of the movements made in 1988 to end the Cold War were a ruse. As Russian jets breach Alaskan airspace, and Russia moves into the Arctic, is the US prepared to hold Alaska? This book has made me think about the role of geography in global politics and human survival. It has made me realize how much we have truly taken for granted in the open spaces of Alaska. The characters remain intended afterthoughts, because as I learned from the movie Iron Jawed Angels, "Men plan, God laughs." The book ends with multiple parties planning how to exploit Alaska and Alaska bordering on an explosion that will create a deadly tsunami that will kill all of the planners. It remains a state and a region filled with ideas and people that we must begin to take an interest in, because it is our future. It remains a place that few of us would dare explore beyond the thousands of reality shows set in its ancient landscapes. I hiked through Alaska, the book, and am wiser. I can now take the last cruise ship out of Vancouver (blame the Jones Act), and head for safer books to read. Read this book, but bring snacks and a dogsled to get you back. Here is what the New York Times had to say in 1988
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