Cold Starry Night: An Alaska Memoir. This item is unavailable.Cold Starry Night: An Alaska Memoir

An internationally known Alaskan artist, Claire Fejes came to Fairbanks in 1946 and discovered a remote outpost, powerful friendships, and cultural isolation.

In 1946, Claire Fejes was a painter and a sculptor exhibiting in New York City. She was a young woman who held the unconventional view that her own career was as important as her husband's. But the custom was for women to follow their husbands, so Claire ended up in Fairbanks, Alaska, the heart of the immense northern territory, where her husband intended to mine for gold. In her refreshingly candid memoir (which she illustrates herself) Fejes tells of a remote outpost where a hardy breed of Alaskans transforms loneliness into powerful bonds, and of artistic and cultural isolation that caused her to embrace Alaska and its people. She describes a host of wonderfully unique Fairbanks characters. Fejes portrayal of the men and women for whom survival and self-sufficiency were foremost in post-war Alaska is a nostalgic glimpse of a simpler time. Cold Starry Night is a marvelously written and totalling engaging memoir of a unique life and fascinating landscape. -- Midwest Book Review