Chasing Alaska: A Portrait Of The Last Frontier Then And Now - Softcover

Bernard, C. B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0762778466 ISBN 13: 9780762778461

Publisher: Lyons Press, 2013

Synopsis

Alaska looms as a mythical, savage place, part nature preserve, part theme park, too vast to understand fully. Which is why C. B. Bernard lashed his canoe to his truck and traded the comforts of the Lower 48 for a remote island and a career as a reporter. He soon learned that a distant relation had made the same trek northwest a century earlier. Captain Joe Bernard spent decades in Alaska, amassing the largest single collection of Native artifacts ever gathered, giving his name to landmarks and even a now-extinct species of wolf. C. B. chased the legacy of this explorer and hunter up the family tree, tracking his correspondence, locating artifacts donated to museums, and finding his journals at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Using these journals as guides, he threw himself into the state once known as Seward’s Folly, boating to remote islands, hiking distant forests, hunting and fishing the pristine environment, forming a landscape view of the place that had lured him and “Uncle Joe,” both men anchored beneath the Northern Lights in freezing, far-flung waters, separated only by time. Here, in crisp, crystalline prose, is his moving portrait of the Last Frontier, then and now.

About this title

About the Author

C. B. Bernard has worked as a newspaper editor, magazine and public radio journalist, senior copywriter at an advertising agency, and marketing and communications specialist. He has been a lecturer at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Writers Conference, a featured writer at the Boston Fiction Festival, and a featured speaker at the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Spring Speakers Series. The Alaska Press Club awarded his series on the oyster farms of Kachemak Bay, and Newsweek columnist Eleanor Clift judged his column about life in Alaska as best in the state. The author of a travel guide to New England bike trails, he has also written extensively for Alaskan Southeaster, Alaska Business Monthly, Pacific Fishing, and Professional Mariner magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Reviews

After moving to Alaska for work in 1999, Bernard discovered that distant relatives had relocated there a century before and that one of them, Captain Joe Bernard, was buried just a few feet from his new home. In the years that followed, Bernard tracked Joe’s adventures, reading his unpublished memoir, meeting his direct descendants, and finding him in the works of famous Arctic explorers like Vilhjálmur Stefánsson. Bernard tries to understand what Joe was looking for in Alaska, and why he himself felt compelled to live there. He writes movingly of the northern climate and landscape, of solitude and distance, of feeling utterly transformed. There are moments when he cannot avoid casting a disparaging eye at tourists (nearly every Alaskan author feels compelled to do so), and his wish that a native Alaskan boy would idolize local fishermen instead of Deadliest Catch is a bit cringeworthy. Clearly, Bernard cannot resist romanticizing the state, but such flights of fancy do not diminish his illuminating quest to understand his fascinating ancestor and himself. --Colleen Mondor

Edition details

• Publisher: Lyons Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0762778466
• ISBN 13: 9780762778461
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288