Jon Mooallem

The subtitle is an excellent summary! Fascinating collection of stories about interactions between humans and wildlife, told in a very approachable down-to-earth manner. Full of weird historical tangents that end up giving great context toward current attitudes and perceptions. Environmentally-minded but absolutely open and honest about how conflicted the human heart gets around nature, this book is an exploration, not a problem/solution presentation. Deeply researched and sufficiently geeky without being pretentious or dense - a nonfiction book that I found just as compelling as my usual fiction reads.… (meer)

At the heart of storytelling and the retelling of a piece of history, writers have many choices when conveying the subject to readers after the fact. Jon Mooallen not only recounts the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 with clarity and well researched facts, but his telling it with Gene Chance as his main 'Character' and parallels to Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" with the book in three acts and references to the play with real people in Anchorage makes the story more compelling to the large themes of life. Knowing the play is important but not necessarily needed when reading this book. It's creative, living and deeply personal in many ways recounting the events of the Good Friday earthquake. Having worked on assignment for the Oregon National Guard in 2014 for the Vigilant Guard exercise that mirrored the 1964 earthquake, I experienced Alaska in my first trip as both a first-responder and as a military photojournalist. Finding this book and reading it over Easter Weekend (over 3 days), now nine years after that assignment, only makes the story resonate that much more for me personally. Really happy to have had this book recommend to me just a few months ago. There are some areas of redundancy that makes me feel like the writer already covered it well, but other than those places, the book is marvelous.… (meer)