Alaskan Travels: Far-Flung Tales of Love and Adventure

(Hardback)

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Description

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.

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Hoagland has captured the restless adventuresomeness ofour frontiersmen, and the riot of nature in its unspoiled glory.

--John Irving

Author Bio

Edward Hoagland has written more than twenty books, including the travel memoirs African Calliope and Notes from the Century Before, the essay collections Walking the Dead Diamond River and The Tugman's Passage, and the novels Cat Man and Seven Rivers West.He worked in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus while attending Harvard, and later traveled the world writing for a number of national magazines, including Harper's and Esquire. He has received numerous prestigious literary awards, and taught at many American colleges and universities. He is a native New Yorker, who now divides his time between Martha's Vineyard and his farmhouse in Sutton, Vermont.