78 books like Shopping for Porcupine

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. 

William, an Inupiaq Alaskan native, grew up in a sod home on the shore of Kotzebue Sound above the arctic circle. Childhood was a traditional subsistence life, living off the land. Starvation, sickness, and death were real and present threats. His early life contrasted greatly with the rest of his life. William was a crucial negotiator in the Alaska Native land claims settlement, one of the largest and most important in U.S. history. He went on to serve in the Alaska state house and senate. A fascinating story of a struggle for equality and the fight for a better future. This is a classic David and Goliath epic. I’ve worked in Kotzebue and many other Alaska villages, and I see the fruits of Williams's labors everywhere I go. 

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 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.

Don Reardon crafts a tale of utter isolation and deprivation. Set in a remote Alaskan village that is suddenly and remorselessly struck with a virulent and deadly strain of influenza or some other similar malady. Quarantined from the rest of Alaska and the world, most of the inhabitants die from the illness leaving the survivors the grim, brutal task of surviving by whatever means possible. With no food coming into the village and winter firmly set upon them, living or dying becomes a question of what people are willing to do for and to one another.

The initial hook in Still Points North was, for me, the opening and its description of the 4-seat plane that the author often flew in with her father. I flew in one when I went to Denali for field research for my novel, and it became not just one of those memories I’ll never forget but also experiential data for my book. I also appreciated how the author so eloquently describes the landscape, comparing and contrasting life in the wilderness with life on the East Coast. But what most impressed me was her revelation, which coincides with the experiences of my novel’s protagonist, that relationships can sometimes be more frightening and challenging than Alaska’s natural savagery.

The oldest of my choices, published in 1920, this classic account of an epic 2,000-mile dogsled journey in northern Alaska, written by an Episcopal missionary, still makes lists of the best books about the 49th state. A masterpiece of adventure and ethnography, with lyrical descriptions of nature, A Winter Circuit is the work of a man not only deeply and widely read about polar exploration and the history of the Far North, but also keenly aware of the social forces bearing down on Alaska’s Native peoples, and eager to support and defend their time-honed way of life.

Arctic Lights Arctic Nights is a recent book discovery for me, and I was instantly captivated.

It is a nonfiction that moves through a beautifully illustrated full year in the Arctic, from summer solstice to summer solstice.

The text was fun and informative, and I loved seeing statistics at the top of each page that show how much daylight there is on that date, when sunrise and sunset take place, and the average temperatures.

It was a great way to visualize the often-shocking light and temperature changes we go through every year in Alaska.

I was stunned by the beauty and the accuracy of the artwork, and my daughter kept commenting on all the things she recognized as an Alaskan child.