Michener's characters are no more than puppets, and you can see him pulling the strings. The territory offers inherent drama (the treatment of Aleuts by Russia is a story as ugly as any in the history of colonialism), and Michener has unearthed some fascinating episodes (a 1000-mile midwinter bicycle trip along the frozen surface of the Yukon River the New Deal resettlement of 900 midwestern farmers in Alaska's Matanuska Valley), but the material never becomes convincing fiction-all the seams show. With his trademark brand of pedagogy, Michener steers his characters through: the arrival and development of major native groups, European exploration and Russian and American colonization, the gold rush, industrial exploitation by the Lower Forty-eight and the struggle for statehood, and, in a tightly packed final section, geo-politics, macroeconomics, the legal tangle of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the life it has fostered amongst the thereby wealthy natives.
“Michener is still, sentence for sentence, writing’s fastest attention grabber.Class convenes with plate tectonics and, before the final bell is rung, Michener doles out nearly 900 pages of Alaskan history in candy-coated, bite-sized vignettes. “Always the master of exhaustive historical research, Michener tracks the settling of Alaska vividly detailed scenes and well-developed characters.” - Boston Herald
The characters that Michener creates are bigger than life.” - Los Angeles Times Book Review Alaska takes the reader on a journey through one of the bleakest, richest, most foreboding, and highly inviting territories in our Republic, if not the world. “Few will escape the allure of the land and people describes. A spellbinding portrait of a human community fighting to establish its place in the world, Alaska traces a bold and majestic saga of the enduring spirit of a land and its people. As his characters struggle for survival, Michener weaves together the exciting high points of Alaska’s story: its brutal origins the American acquisition the gold rush the tremendous growth and exploitation of the salmon industry the arduous construction of the Alcan Highway, undertaken to defend the territory during World War II. Michener guides us through Alaska’s fierce terrain and history, from the long-forgotten past to the bustling present. In this sweeping epic of the northernmost American frontier, James A.
0 kommentar(er)
