Alaskan Travels: Far-Flung Tales of Love and Adventure

Alaskan Travels explores the remote regions where Eskimos, Indians, and loners from the lower 48 live. Hoagland writes of the millionaire real estate and oil moguls in Anchorage and elsewhere. It was interesting to learn of the living conditions of people who lived in far flung towns. These villages were plagued by illness, especially TB, suicide, spouse abuse, and alcoholism. Modern culture, conveniences, the federal and state government, and oil money influenced their lifestyle. Hoagland traveled throughout Alaska with Linda who was a nurse. Since she was employed by the state travelling with her opened otherwise shut doors.It is a fascinating journey that took place in the mid Eighties. Although somewhat dated, the book provides wonderful insight into the Alaska of today. It is well worth the read.

I read Hoagland's Notes From the Century Before years ago, and I still consider it one of my favorite books. I've also visited Alaska 10 times, and have traveled throughout the state. I purchased this book with great expectations, hoping for the same experience I had with Notes. Unfortunately, I found it a difficult book to read. I enjoyed the content, since I'd been to some of the same places as Hoagland, and he's a keen observer of people. He does describe very well the disintegration of much Eskimo and Indian culture in Alaska and the disillusionment of many immigrants from the lower 48. It's also a good snapshot in time of the early 1980s in the state. And he's very good at remembering and passing on stories from his travels. But the writing turned out to be full of long, run-on sentences, awkward constructions, and local jargon, which slowed down my reading to the point where I was asking myself what a sentence was about, before I'd finished the sentence, or where a paragraph was going. Some sentences could have stood as entire paragraphs themselves. Some paragraphs cover 3 or more topics. I'm a slow, careful reader, anyway, and this style of writing made the book a chore to get through. I'm sure that a good editor could have made a number of improvements. In addition, there were some places in the book that read like a transcription of his notes from 30 years earlier (fortunately there weren't too many examples like this.)I also didn't like some of his generalizations about Alaskans or tourists. For example, his characterization of McKinley climbers at Talkeetna as "athletic trust-funders and remission men" doesn't ring true to my ears, since most of those I know are typical climbers with very little income or wealth. (I'm sure there are ones like he describes, and it is an interesting observation.) Also, I didn't enjoy reading so many intimate details of his relationship with his nurse friend. Some things are just better left unsaid.I do still consider his body of work to be excellent, at least what I've read of it. This book just didn't measure up to his standards, in my opinion. On the other hand, for someone who is a real Alaskaphile, and who is up to the task, there's a lot of good content and observation here.

This is Edward Hoagland's look at Alaska about 30 years ago. He spent an extended time traveling in the larger cities but most especially in the outlaying areas where the Native tribes still live. He also talks about a few white people who have come to homestead or get away from lives in the lower 40 states. He travels with a girlfriend who is a nurse to the people where they may only see a medical person two times a year. You learn a lot about the people, the wildlife, dog sledding, and survival.

I read this while I was traveling in Alaska. It made me realize what a tough state this is to live in and it deserves so much more attention and respect. You definitely have to be a certain type of person to live here, which I believe the author illustrates. I feel like the love story just dropped off without much conclusion. I wish I had known more about what happened when it is a large part of the story.

Alaska has always intrigued me - the vast and unapproachable size of this distant territory, the hearty souls who traverse the frontier, the adventurers who escape there to start over and recreate themselves. Though I've only touched the periphery of Alaska on a cruise through the Inside Passage, I hope to plan a much more extensive trip there, and I looked forward to Hoaglund's book to reveal some of the secrets of Alaska. Though he spent quite a bit of time there accompanying his travelling nurse girlfriend and he covered a lot of territory, it appears that he has only a surface level understanding of the people and places he visited. Much of the book reads as a dispassionate list of places that he passed through and tribes and individuals that he met along the way, but there's no "deep dive" on any of it. We don't get to discover how, or if, he was changed by his time there. He does throw in a few references to a wife back home and the girlfriend, including some gratuitous sex, apparently to justify the word "love in the title. The grand finale, a barge ride up the Yukon River to deliver fuel to a remote military station, didn't come across as an adventure at all; it was too impersonal, and could have been written by just checking off place names on a map.Hoaglund's writing is dense, and frequently "stream of consciousness" in style with long run-on impenetrable sentences. For example: "The bowhead, with two feet of blubber cushioning it against the cold, a handsomely white-napkinned chin underneath a head about a third of its total length, possessed a skull capable of bashing breathing holes in several inches of ice, broad graceful mouth large enough to sieve gargantuan amounts of plankton and krill through those wondrously pliant, but skinny, still baleen plates, five or ten feet long, and two hundred or more on each side - that the whalers sold for dressmakers to whet the lust of city men in the form of bustiers and bustles - was a slow swimmer, surfacing predictably every twenty minutes to breathe, and floated conveniently when killed because of that fat content, which lighted the lamps of Europe." It's as if he doesn't want to buy a period to end a sentence, but he can have all the commas and dashes he wants for free...In spite of the dense language, there are a few insights, such as "Alaska is a destination created out of anger and quests... where people decide how much wildness they want to have, maybe content with a suburb of Anchorage." Also, "Alaska, crammed with extremes, attracts new citizens with the shifty eyes of folk who may have left their previous residence in a hurry, without unduly bidding goodbye." He also writes about rampant alcoholism, divorces and suicides. It is indeed a land of extremes, which apparently brings out the worst and best in people - but I still want to go there for an extended visit !