Alaska by Michener

whoops, hit enter instead of tab and got a big empty message!

Well, I've chose this book for my winter traveling reading. I've heard good things about it. Did anyone else enjoy or dislike it and why? :)

I haven't read it yet but I do have it. Some of the reviews I've read said it's very dull and boring. I hope it's not because I'm looking forward to reading it since I'm born and raised in Alaska. I love reading about Alaskan History.

I read it some years ago and it was pretty good, as I have found all of Michener's sweeping historical works of this kind. The Russian aspect to Alaskan history interested me particularly.

Thanks for the post John. It will be interesting to read the Russian part of it considering I'm Athabascan Indian and as far as I know the Athabascan's came over from Russia on the Bering Sea Bridge hundreds of years ago.

Have you read any other Michener books? I have Texas and I can get my hands on Chesapeake(sp).

I've read most of the ones in my LT catalogue, except Texas and The Drifters. I love sweeping historical novels covering a particular area or group of families. Carribean and Poland are probably my favourites, Hawaii is also interesting.

Carribean won't touchstone properly.

Caribbean by Michener

There it is! :D

Well, I started the Alaska..and the beginning is quite dull, but perhaps I'll enjoy it more when I'm not also bogged down with research for my masters. It's on my list of reads for the holiday break. :)

hmmm... I read it awhile back (1993) and it was very good in parts, but my overall impression was mixed. I fell in love in Michener with The Covenant and then fell out of love with The Source; a novel. If you haven't read Michener before, then you should know he tries to cover and explore complex histories of a region through a series of short stories that are usually loosely interconnected. It can be very good. The volume of ideas he covers are very aggressive and his books have a few problems. Sometimes his recreations are a little fanciful or even inaccurate. Also, sometimes his stories are a bit contrived, and don't offer much. In Alaska, there were parts that really caught my imagination and that I still remember vividly, like the poor guy that was caught up in the gold rush... and the entire chapter on the life of one salmon. But, many of the other stories didn't do much for me, especially the more recent history.

Coming Into the Country by John McPhee is one of my favorite books about living in Alaska.

Amazon.com
Residents of the Lower 48 sometimes imagine Alaska as a snow-covered land of igloos, oil pipelines, and polar bears. But Alaska is far more complex geographically, culturally, ecologically, and politically than most Americans know, and few writers are as capable of capturing this complexity as John McPhee. In Coming into the Country, McPhee describes his travels through much of the state with bush pilots, prospectors, and settlers, as well as politicians and businesspeople who have their eyes set on a very different future for the state.