Chasing Alaska
A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Alaska looms as a mythical, savage place, part nature preserve, part theme park, too vast to understand fully. Which is why C. B. Bernard lashed his canoe to his truck and traded the comforts of the Lower 48 for a remote island and a career as a reporter. He soon learned that a distant relation had made the same trek northwest a century earlier. Captain Joe Bernard spent decades in Alaska, amassing the largest single collection of Native artifacts ever gathered, giving his name to landmarks and even a now-extinct species of wolf. C. B. chased the legacy of this explorer and hunter up the family tree, tracking his correspondence, locating artifacts donated to museums, and finding his journals at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Using these journals as guides, he threw himself into the state once known as Seward’s Folly, boating to remote islands, hiking distant forests, hunting and fishing the pristine environment, forming a landscape view of the place that had lured him and “Uncle Joe,” both men anchored beneath the Northern Lights in freezing, far-flung waters, separated only by time. Here, in crisp, crystalline prose, is his moving portrait of the Last Frontier, then and now.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bernard, a reporter who lived in Alaska for several years, has crafted a memoir of his time there that neatly dovetails with his discovery that he was not the first Bernard to run away from a mundane life in order to explore Alaska. Joe Bernard, C.B.'s Arctic-exploring relative of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, left behind a set of journals of which excerpts are sprinkled throughout. They're gripping tales of men freezing to death on the ice, Inuit life, and survival under the harshest conditions. It's not surprising that Bernard's contemporary musings on Alaska seem lackluster in comparison, but when he rides along with an overextended Alaskan state trooper or flies with a Search-and-Rescue pilot charged with hundreds of miles of surveillance, he's able to peel back his romanticizing of the earlier age to ask intriguing questions about the nature of life in the wilderness. His finest chapter is spent with his distant cousin, a man who knew Joe, knows Alaska, and cannot be summarized. While Bernard overworks tiresome tropes about the shallowness of Alaskan tourists, the story of Joe Bernard and his descendants' attempts to understand him and each other makes this worth a read. B & W Photos.
