To spend time with them is like reading the obituaries of journalists - the men are all context they're the stories they covered. But because they are constituted as totems, you never have the sense of having known them. Every once in a while, he builds up the reader's affection for his people. His strength is the sheer forward drive of his narrative. He's a writer.' "Ī gratuitous slur, but it raises the question: Are the authors of historical novels free from the obligation to provide characters with emotional lives? Ought the publishing genius behind Hawaii, Texas and Chesapeake and numerous other books to tamper with his formula and give characters real personalities, idiosyncratic dreams, original thoughts? Michener chews away at history like the giant man-sized beavers that used to gnaw on the boreal forest. Even Dashiell Hammett makes a cameo the bush scout Nate Coop spots him on Adak: " 'Is he an actor,' he asked some airmen as they finished talking with Hammett. Alaska doesn't lack for explanations of the Richter scale, advice on how to drive a Caterpillar tractor, caulk a river boat and equip yourself for a climb on Denali. The kitchen-sink esthetic says nothing is extraneous. There's really nothing important that Michener doesn't include, and that's the problem. It encompasses fictionalized histories of the state's aboriginal populations Russian exploration and settlement the great Klondike gold strike salmon fishing battle stories from the World War II campaign in the Aleutians the building of the Alcan Highway. If nothing else, Alaska does justice to the scale of the "Great Land." At 868 pages, crowded with dates, historical and fictive figures, the book ranges catholically from the billion-year-old bumpercar stuff of plate tectonics to the political upheavals of the present day. Michener has solved the problem of not having a thousand years to cover the whole state by employing an army of researchers. In his new historical novel, Alaska, James A. Where hardship complements beauty, life is an art. There's no better place to read Rilke this side of Europe. To live in Alaska, even if you are wearing white patent leather shoes and doing real estate deals, is to feel your life pitched at a poetic intensity.
Partially what makes Alaska so extreme is its capacity to call forth a response of equal intensity in its passionate inhabitants. Statistics assail the mind - 586,000 square miles 39 mountain ranges 10,000 rivers and streams.īut getting the measure of the Alaska is not a simple matter of cataloguing physical properties, or pleading a beauty that beggars language. PEOPLE WHO write about Alaska are always trying to find a way to come to terms with its staggering size it's been said that if you covered a thousand acres a day you could not explore the breadth of it in a thousand years.
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