Why this book:  I’ve always been fascinated by Alaska, and also had never read one of Michener’s tomes.  I’ve only been to the state of Alaska once, but my daughter spends a lot of time there and I feel drawn to it and want to go back.   Alaska was recommended to me by a very good friend who has read a number of Michener’s books, so I decided to take it on. Glad I did.

Summary in 3 Sentences.   I can’t compare it to other books by Michener (since I haven’t read any others yet), but I understand Alaska  follows his  standard format – beginning with geology, then biological history, then human history – it is a series of inter-connected novellas that paint a broad picture of the evolution of human society in the geographical area about which he is writing.  In Alaska, Michener creates compelling characters struggling and thriving in early and then later Alaska, their struggles serving as a lens through which we learn about the broad scope of Alaskan history, with an emphasis on the last 200 years, which included Russian ownership and exploitation, the purchase of Seward’s Folly, the two major gold rushes and then the key 20th century issues leading up to the late 1980s, when the book was published. 

My Impressions: I really enjoyed this book – it’s long, as most Michener books are, but it’s broken up into sections of about 120-150 pages each of which has its own characters,  and context, their own drama, their own cultural and historical lessons.  It conveys a sense of the primal grandeur of Alaska – its size and unforgiving terrain and climate, the natural and uncontaminated splendor of much of its environment, and the courage and character of the pioneers who over the last two and a half centuries made it what it is today.  Characters do overflow from one section into another, and the children, grand children and great grand children of earlier characters dramatize the later parts of his story.   It is indeed a novel with continuity that flows through the book, but he is teaching natural and human history through the rich lens of the lives of some truly memorable characters – some historical, many fictional – who represent the world he describes, and who live the story he tells. 

I was fascinated by the Russian exploration and ultimate exploitation of Alaska – there were a few real good guys – even by today’s standards, and quite a few really bad guys and a lot of innocent victims – mostly native Alaskans – who suffered as a result. 

The proposal for the US to purchase Alaska from the Russians passed in Congress in 1867 by a very slim margin ( known as “Seward’s folly”) and then for 50 plus years, the US government essentially ignored and neglected the potential of that huge and largely unpopulated land mass, in practice turning it over to scalawags and nefarious profiteers and carpetbaggers.  I learned how business leaders in Seattle conspired to keep Alaska and Alaskans dependent on them, so that they could exploit and profit from it with impunity, and the rest of the US couldn’t have cared less. 

I had read a lot about the gold rush in the Klondike, but didn’t know that the vast majority of people who risked all to seek their fortune there came up empty handed.  A few of the original claims yielded gold, but those claims played out pretty quickly, while the fantasy and dream continued to lure people into a very remote and, for much of the year, a very cold and harsh enviornment.  Though most found nothing, for the rest of their lives these gold seekers savored the adventure they had undertaken and the lessons they had learned in the arduous travel to get there and life they lived there.  

I had never heard of  the gold rush in Nome which followed just a few years after the Klondike, which in contrast yielded tens of millions of dollars of gold for a lot more people – from gold found in the sand on the beaches.  Again, more scalawags, corruption, and nefarious activity well north of the Arctic Circle  – and all the vice that surrounds poor men trying to make quick and easy money. 

I also didn’t know about the exploitation of the salmon fisheries and how much money was involved in that endeavor early in the 20th century.  To help us understand that story, he creates a fictional salmon who we follow through it’s six year life-span until it returns to it’s native creek to spawn – helping me better appreciate the Alaskan wild-caught salmon I regularly feast on in California.   I was also fascinated with  a whole section Michener has on the evolution of the bush pilot culture – which has been essential to the growth and prosperity of Alaska.  And he offers us a fascinating stories of how Alaska mobilized to play its part in WWII  – as the Japanese sought to establish a foothold in the Aleutians and use it for access into the North American continent. 

And the political battle for statehood – which was emotional and had strong opposition from those who argued that Alaska could never govern itself and who were invested in keeping it dependent on a few easy-to-influence political appointees and self-interested businesses from the lower 48.  The book concludes with the impact of the oil industry on the native American and Eskimo cultures – the influx of huge amounts of money into communities that had for millennia been subsistence hunters of whales, seals, and other wildlife from the sea. 

All of these stories are populated with great characters who reflect the sensitivity and humanity of James Michener.  I can’t help but to truly appreciate and admire Michener the man, who conceived these characters and wrote these many stories in this book – the bad guys are never wholly bad, the good guys are not wholly good, women are admired and treated with respect and play key roles in Alaska.  

At the beginning of the book, he provides a couple of pages he calls “fact and fiction” in which he tells us which of the characters are historical and which are fictional.  Alaska the book has made me an even greater fan of Alaska the state, the culture, the people, the way of life – now that I have a better sense of the breadth and scope of its history and multiple cultures. 

Alaska is broken up into twelve sections or fairly long chapters.  Below is a list of these chapters and a brief look at what they cover. 

1. The Clashing Terrains – about the plate tectonics in the Pacific. I dIdn’t know that in 28 million years, Los Angeles will be next door to Anchorage.  Guess we’ll have to wait and see…
2. The Ice Castle – describes how mammals crossed the land bridge on what is now the Bering straits and how they prospered and lived – wooly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers – and more.
3. People of the North – here Michener creates village in Siberia, as always with memorable characters, and we get to know it’s leaders and its people, and why they kept moving East – eventually to find themselves in a different world – in what is now Alaska 
4. The Explorers – Here, at about page 107, we are introduced to intrepid explorers from Tsarist Russia in the late 1700s and the drama of their exploration and settling of coastal Alaska from the Aleutian Islands down to Sitka and the lower coastal areas. 
5. The Duel – Is an amazing story of the tension/battle  between Russian Orthodox Christianity and the native  shamanistic religion of the Athapaskan Indians.  It also includes a tragic but largely unknown story of an almost genocidal racism and exploitation of native Alaskans by Russians. 
6. Lost Worlds – In this chapter we move to the coastal Native Tlingit tribes in southern coastal Alaska and the battles that ensue when the Russians seek to subdue and harness them to their own ends. And in this section, the Americans appear and compete with Russians for furs and pelts and we learn how the Americans (barely) purchased Alaska from the Russians and ousted even the good and well-meaning  Russians from their new territory. 
7. Giants in Chaos – describes the negligence of the American government toward its new property, the rise of the whaling industry and the exploitation not only of whales but of native Alaskans by both Russian and American whalers and fur traders. We learn of the historical figure Captain Mike Healy (an African American naval captain in the 1870s!) and a missionary Dr Sheldon Jackson and how they combined forces for good – and sometimes not-so-good.
8. Gold – Fascinating story about the rush of poor and dispossessed Americans into the Klondike, the agonies of their travel and the challenges and disappointment of being there. 
9. The Golden Beaches of Nome An incredible story.  While prospectors around Nome Alaska were searching the creeks and rivers for gold dust, an enterprising Siberian prospector found hordes of it in the sand on the beaches just outside of Nome. And a new gold rush was on, with all its tragedy, jubilation, sin and corruption. And then it was over. 
10. Salmon – Mostly native Alaskan fishermen had been fishing for salmon for millennia, until some enterprising Seattle businessmen saw great opportunities for large scale capture of salmon and canneries.  More wealth and exploitation, drama, heroism, and compromise. 
11. The Railbelt – In this section we are well into the 20th century and Alaska is attracting more adventurers from the lower forty-eight.  We get to know families that were incentivized to move to Alaska to farm, some who broke off to become bush pilots, and merchants, and they brought with them the racism endemic in the lower forty-eight against the native Alaskans. And we read of heroic stories of commandos at war with Japanese invaders on the Aleutian Islands. 
12. The Rim of Fire – The book concludes with this fascinating story of a young woman who breaks out of a very conservative upbringing to teach in a remote Eskimo village in Northern Alaska. Her story provides a lens thru which we see how the incredible wealth that Prudhoe Bay oil brought to Alaska impacted the native Eskimo culture and the environment.