Homelands: Kayaking the Inside Passage - Softcover

Byron Ricks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380809184 ISBN 13: 9780380809189

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1999

Synopsis

Describes one couple's five-month journey by kayak from Alaska's Glacier Bay to the Puget Sound, chronicling the remarkable beauty and wonders of a fragile wilderness and their encounters with the wildlife and human inhabitants of an endangered world. Original.

About this title

About the Author

Byron Ricks is a native of the Midwest and a graduate of Grinnell College in Iowa.An outdoor leader, he has written for Outside magazine, Men's Journal and other publications.He lives with his wife, Maren Van Nostrand, an outdoor educator and environmental planner, near Seattle, Washington.

Reviews

In a book that is sometimes invigorating and sometimes maddeningly attenuated, Ricks recounts the five-month journey from Alaska's Glacier Bay to Washington's Puget Sound that he and his wife made by sea kayak. Ricks is obviously as well studied in the geology and the ecology of the terrain as he is blithely realistic about his ability to impose his plans upon it, bandying terms like "bathymetry" and "isostatic rebound" as freely as "ibuprofen." But while Ricks, an outdoors writer who lives in the Northwest, occasionally shows descriptive power worthy of John McPhee, the book's diary-entry structure limits his creativity, prevents inventive shifts in scene and leaves the narrative leaden in spots. Through his talks with people along the route, Ricks comes to an understanding of the term "homeland" not as something static but as a word that "speaks to the kind of relationship a people have with their place." With this interpretation, Ricks tries to find a connection to his own country even as he spends his voyage's last day paddling through a scum of oily water and past an island prison with high walls and razor wire. The book truly conveys the experiences of a long journey through remarkable terrain. Readers will share some of Ricks's elation over natural beauty and hard-won insight. But they will also be frustrated by a narrative that is as unnecessarily arduous as the journey it recounts was inevitably so. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0380809184
• ISBN 13: 9780380809189
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Maren Van Nostrand
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384