ALASKA BOOKS REVIEWS
I can vouch for this as I know half of the “vivid characters,” mentioned in this exploration of rural Alaska—including my own father— and McPhee did well to capture nuances missed by the average New York journalist when visiting the Great Land. It was great fun visiting them again last week, in print. As an addendum, looking back, I wonder if McPhee knew he was also chronicling the development of America’s answer to the English attitude that gentlemen did not really do anything in the trades. We have developed a social class of Ivy league students that make their life’s work studying cause and effect of ecosystems. And as McPhee has chronicled, you can run into them in the strangest places. I vividly remember a flight of helicopters ala Apocalypse Now coming into a game preserve where the school vacation protectors of things Alaskan did not grasp that they too were an intrusion.
Barry Murray
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