Coming into the Country | John McPhee | A trip around Alaska in the 70's

Coming into the Country | John McPhee | McPhee on Alaska

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Coming into the Co...

	Coming into the Country John McPhee Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush.

Readers of McPhee?s earlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined into an organic whole. In the course of this volume we are made acquainted with the lore and techniques of placer mining, the habits and legends of the barren-ground grizzly, the outlook of a young Athapaskan chief, and tales of the fortitude of settlers?ordinary people compelled by extraordinary dreams. Coming into the Country unites a vast region of America with one of America?s notable literary craftsmen, singularly qualified to do justice to the scale and grandeur of the design.

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A trip around Alaska in the 70's

I traveled to Alaska in 2006 but lived there in the early 70's. Why I delayed so long in reading "Coming into the Country" I don't know, but John McPhee has taken me back to that earlier day. Both his character and place descriptions are wonderful and make me long for the cabins, the ice break-up, the dogs, the bush planes, and the 55 gallon drums. The Anchorage of today is much changed, but the bush is still there -- Thank God.

McPhee on Alaska

My wife and I like to listen to a tape while we read the book. We are rereading this book that way. It is a classic and a good introduction to Alaska, where we have lived and worked and touristed.

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First Class

Want to read about the realities of the 49th state????
Want to really learn something about this region???
Want to get good visuals????????
If NOT don't read this book!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Wonderful Relic

This book is a wonderful relic, the last plausible vision of a living American frontier. In the mid seventies, McPhee went to Alaska to do a few pieces for the New Yorker. He met a lot of trappers, prospectors, and "river people" who'd built moss-chinked cabins and whose individualism, gruff hospitality, and happiness he admired. McPhee made a plea for democratic access to Alaskan land. He argued that land far from roads should remain fair game for homesteaders in perpetuity.

It is odd to read an ode to Alaska's wild immensity at a time when islands are being evacuated in the Aleutians, polar bears are drowning, and the permafrost is melting. The question these days is not whether Americans can still choose to live in more or less untainted outback. The question is whether that outback will soon be transformed beyond recognition, not by oil drilling, but by climate change.

What Coming into the Country offers the twenty-first century is escapism and nostalgia. McPhee's account of the political squabbles over the location of Alaska's capital has lost its relevance, but the rest of the book still comes to life. We meet a mix of clannish Christians, proud native people, and prickly bootleggers in the small, dry town of Eagle. McPhee's tale of a man's survival in sub-zero weather after a plane crash constitutes a minor classic of its own.

The book reminds us how powerful the frontier fantasy remains in American psyches. Can it be harnessed as a metaphor? Can the dream of self-reliance on a private patch of woods help motivate us, indirectly, to cut carbon emissions? It has motivated us to go camping and conserve some wild lands even while ruining others. Still, I suspect that as the environmental movement shifts in response to global warming, we may have to jettison the frontier fantasy. It depends too much on a view of nature as more powerful than man. Whether or not we agree with Bill McKibben that we have arrived at the end of nature, we know that everything is responding to elevated temperatures. There is no untouched patch of land left in Alaska. The romance of a homestead sours when the flora and fauna are marching north past the log cabin, driven by coal and oil fires from all over the planet.

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Excellent look into life in the bush

This book was difficult for me to rate, since it is really a compilation of three separate books into one volume. The first two books I would give 3/5 stars, while the third book (the one actually entitled "Coming Into the Country") is superb and deserves 5 stars. Thus, my averaged 4-star rating.

I found the first two books very interesting and readable, but they tended to delve off into a more philosophical orientation describing the history of Alaska, which I deemed long-winded at times. The third book, however, kept my attention perked and was just what I was hoping for when I purchased this book -- a look into the life of an Alaskan bushman -- since it was told through stories of people the author meets along the way during his long stint in the bush, which complimented his writing passion.

A good book and well worth the read.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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