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The Scottish-American naturalist and explorer showed up in Alaska 138 years after Steller, just a dozen years after the US purchased Alaska from the cash-strapped Russians for about two pennies per acre. Wonderful writing and gripping tales of the Russian discovery of the new world. Ford vividly recounts the story of naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller's voyage to the Aleutian Islands and what would eventually become the colony of Russian America. This is an extraordinary and compelling account of a 1741-1742 Russian expedition. Where the Sea Breaks its Back by Corey Ford It's also about what people bring to Alaska – disaffection, idealism, the search for reinvention and redemption – that ends up being swallowed by one of the wildest places in North America. The book is about so much more than the state itself. Into the Wild by Jon KrakauerĪ bestselling book and critically acclaimed movie, Into the Wild tells the tale of one young man's search for meaning in wilderness that ends in an abandoned bus in Alaska.

Required reading for anyone who wants to know about the grand themes and petty politics of the largest state in the US. McPhee is a grand master of narrative nonfiction. This book, more than any other I have read, accurately reflected back to me the stark realities and wide-ranging possibilities facing Alaska near the close of the 20th century, while offering insight into what the state might become. This collection of fiction, nonfiction, and verse has found a permanent home on my bookshelf.ġ. The following shortlist includes books I discovered while living (briefly) in Alaska, and through gathering research for my novel. Alaska also offers the increasingly rare opportunity to live in close proximity to vast tracts of wilderness. It is a place of big dreams and harsh realities, astounding landscape, curious politics (including a long-standing independence party), midnight summer sun, and shockingly brief winter days. Greeley's advice soon came to be understood in the popular culture as: "Go West, young man, and find your fame and your fortune." Alaska is a place apart from the contiguous United States, and it shares more in common with Canada's Yukon territory and British Columbia. Discovering this little-known historical fact compelled me to study Alaska's remarkable history and eventually write my second novel, a tale of wartime survival and devotion, The Wind is Not a River.Īlaska is a place at the very limits of the American drive to "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country" – the exhortation made famous by the 19th-century author Horace Greeley. In 1943, one of the toughest and least-known American battles of the war took place in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. The blind spot most of us have about Alaska is nearly as vast as its geography – it's about seven times the size of the UK. What is Alaska? Rugged homeland of resilient Native Americans, former Russian colony, site of the only battle of the second world war to take place on US soil … wait a minute, second world war battlefield? Believe it.