Kings of the Yukon
An Alaskan River Journey
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
**Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018 and the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year 2019**
'Weymouth combines acute political, personal and ecological understanding, with the most beautiful writing reminiscent of a young Robert Macfarlane. He is, I have no doubt, a significant voice for the future' Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times literary editor
'Adam Weymouth takes his place beside the great travel writers' Susan Hill
'Dazzling' Kamila Shamsie, author of 'Home Fire'
A captivating, lyrical account of an epic voyage by canoe down the Yukon River.
The Yukon River is almost 2,000 miles long, flowing through Canada and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Setting out to explore one of the most ruggedly beautiful and remote regions of North America, Adam Weymouth journeyed by canoe on a four-month odyssey through this untrammelled wilderness, encountering the people who have lived there for generations. The Yukon's inhabitants have long depended on the king salmon who each year migrate the entire river to reach their spawning grounds. Now the salmon numbers have dwindled, and the encroachment of the modern world has changed the way of life on the Yukon, perhaps for ever.
Weymouth's searing portraits of these people and landscapes offer an elegiac glimpse of a disappearing world. Kings of the Yukon is an extraordinary adventure, told by a powerful new voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British journalist Weymouth ventures 2,000 miles on the Yukon River in an earnest quest to discover whether the Chinook salmon (or king salmon), which is in rapid decline worldwide, can survive in "the last chance on earth to get it right." Weymouth interweaves his observations on wildlife with an analysis of sociopolitical and environmental factors that affect not just the salmon but also the people whose cultures and economies are built around it. He is adept at technical descriptions of how hatcheries and fishwheels work ("around a central axle, traditionally greased with bear fat, are two baskets formed from a lattice of spruce poles") and how integral salmon is to the ecosystem (grizzly bears "can get through 40 salmon in eight hours" in order to gain 50% of their body weight before winter). He is knowledgeable about attempts to control salmon that date back centuries and the battle between subsistence fishers and wildlife managers. His most effective vignettes record interactions with those he met on his journey, including Alaskan reality TV stars who battled a raging flood and an 84-year-old woman at her fish camp. This is a richly told history of one of North America's most remote wildernesses.
