82 books like Fifty Miles from Tomorrow

Terry was my grade school teacher many moons ago. I love our shared history from that time but this book is so much more than a pleasant reminiscence. Learn what it was like teaching in an isolated Gwitchin First Nations village on the banks of the Porcupine River in Yukon, Canada, or homesteading on a lonely lake, miles from the nearest neighbor. Go on a dangerous bush plane flight, a perilous climbing expedition, or a moonlit dog team sojourn across a frozen lake. Terry chased bears out of her yard and navigated a throng of unruly seven-year-olds with the same calm and confidence. This book is a read, a reread, a share, and a great gift. 

In December 1943, an army test flight took off from Ladd Field near Fairbanks Alaska the instruments malfunctioned and the plane crashed. Read about how the only survivor battled against bitterly cold temperatures, injuries, and starvation. Leon Crane was a city boy from Philadelphia with little wilderness experience. What he did have was an indomitable spirit and an intense desire to live. He soon realized he wouldn’t be rescued so he took it upon himself and walked to safety through some of the harshest terrain on the planet. Well-written and fast-paced, the author's prose inserts the reader into the story. You can feel Cranes hunger pangs and the winds stabbing icy fingers. This book is a tribute to the man's uncrushable will to survive.

In 1958 Edward Teller, the father of the H bomb, and the United States Government wanted to explode six mega-ton bombs, forty miles from an Inupiat village on the coast of the Bering Sea in arctic Alaska. Project Chariot was to be the first in a line of proposed projects using nuclear bombs for creating info structure. The explosions were intended to create a deep-water port. Read how a small Inupiat village, a handful of scientists, and a few conservationists took on the US government and won, in the process, birthed the modern conservation movement in the United States. Well written, informative, inspirational, and a joy to read.

This is an inspiring memoir depicting life in the arctic, living the traditional substance way of the Inupiat people. Kanter’s writing is top notch and he describes the arctic life as only one who has truly lived it can. I’ve traveled and worked in the land he loves and calls home. He nails the brutality and the rawness and the beauty and the wonder of that vast and harsh land. This book is personal and emotional and depicts a lifestyle, a land, and a culture that’s not often honestly portrayed in literature. I devoured this book and was left wanting more. I’ve met Seth and he is a great guy and a hell of a writer, in my opinion.

This is an ancient, novel-length tale of a hero in the Alaska wilderness near the dawn of time, confronting the cruelty and grief endemic in a world in which survival always hangs on the luck and skill of the hunter. Oman, who died in 2018 at 102, told me 30 years ago about holding onto the Qayaq story, even through the years when her cultural practices were effectively outlawed. She grew up at a time in Kotzebue when her father, a shaman, could only tell the ancient stories of her Inupiaq people at night, in secret, vouchsafing them with her for another generation. As an adult she continued collecting them, and then, in her old age, published this graceful and haunting story, which seems to reach to us from another world.

Kantner’s book, from 2004, is the first literary novel, in my judgment, to present an authentic view of contemporary Alaska.

The story (thinly disguised from the author’s own life) is told by a white boy growing up in a remote northern part of Alaska, living with his family as an earlier generation of Inupiaq people did. The boy fits in with neither the modernizing Inupiaq of a nearby village nor the white world, although he is very much at ease with the natural world and the skills his life demands.

When he later tries city life, the contrast is stark and painful. Kantner presents both worlds in exquisite detail as he explores larger themes about values, choices, and human relationships. Ordinary Wolves won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.

Before I went to Alaska for the first time, I did some background reading and thankfully discovered this book and the writing of John McPhee. He and Alaska were made for each other. He’s the kind of writer who is interested in everything, and everyone, and conveys his curiosity and his discoveries with enthusiasm. Alaska is unique, as is McPhee’s style of writing, jumping from topic to topic as the mood – and his journey – takes him, and hauling the reader along with him. He’s the kind of traveling companion who’s forever saying: let’s see what’s down there, I wonder how that works, let’s go talk to that guy.

Here’s my confession: I hated Chris McCandless by the time I finished this book. I hated his cockiness and lack of respect for the power of the wilderness.

But you know what I give him credit for? His ability to leave his life of privilege and the courage to go out into the world and forge his own destiny. He did what he thought was best for him despite the pushback he received from his friends and family.

I think I hated him so much because I wanted him to succeed, and he doomed himself through his own hubris. 

I first discovered this little gem of a book while researching a historical fiction novel of my own. Set in the 1920s, it’s about a little orphan girl named Bo who's being raised by two rough and tumble gold miners—both men. It’s a fun and exciting adventure story, while at the same time providing an insightful and authentic look at life after the famous Alaska gold rush. A perfect read for ages 8-12. 

Haines was best known as a poet, highly respected by other writers but uncompromising and without much commercial success or recognition. This collection of essays in the form of a memoir similarly makes no compromise, dispensing with plot, characters, or even a clear sense of time and geography. Instead, Haines takes the reader deep into the mind of a lone man surviving for decades in the harshest wilderness, thinking, observing, and writing—his own mind. And the writing is so strong, it turns out, that he doesn’t need those usually necessary tools of narrative he pointedly ignores. Instead, we feel the cold, see the hypnotic stars above the snow, and feel the brittle edge of aloneness. Through sheer stylistic austerity, those dark lonely nights are real.