Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life

By Nancy Lord. 2009. University of Nebraska Press. 248 pages. $24.95 hardcover. Available at www.nebraskapress.unl.edu

For Nancy Lord, what began as a yearning for adventure and a childhood fascination with a wild and distant land culminated in a move to Alaska in the early 1970s. Here she discovered the last place in America “big and wild enough to hold the intact landscapes and the dreams that are so absent today from almost everywhere else.” In Rock, Water, Wild, Lord takes readers along as she journeys among salmon, sea lions, geese, moose, bears, glaciers, and indigenous languages and ultimately into a new understanding, beyond geographic borders, of our intricate and intimate connections to the natural world.

Nancy Lord is Alaska’s writer laureate and a Pushcart Prize–winning author. Her previous acclaimed books include Fishcamp, Green Alaska, The Man Who Swam with Beavers, and Beluga Days.

The Snow Tourist

By Charlie English. 2008. Portobello Books Ltd. 272 pages. $24.56 hardcover. Available at booksellers nationwide and www.amazon.com.

Charlie English goes in search of the best snow on the planet and, along the way, he explains the extraordinary hold this commonplace phenomenon has over us, and reveals the ongoing drama of our relationship with it. English's journey begins with the magical moment when his two-year old son sees snow for the first time, before setting off in the footsteps of the Romantic poets over the Alps, following the sled-tracks of the Inuit across Greenland, and meeting up with a flurry of fellow enthusiasts, from snow-making scientists in Japan and global warming experts at Caltech, to snowplow drivers in Alaska.

The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics

Edited by Maria Shaa Tlaa Williams. 2009. Duke University Press. 387pages. $ 25.95 softcover. Available at www.amazon.com.

Alaska is home to more than 200two hundred federally recognized tribes. Yet the long histories and diverse cultures of Alaska’s first peoples are often ignored, while the stories of Russian fur hunters and American gold miners, salmon canneries and oil pipelines, are well known. Filled with essays, poems, songs, stories, maps, and visual art, this volume provides the perspectives of Alaska Native people, from a Tlingit photographer to Athabascan and Yupik linguists, and from an Alutiiq mask carver to a prominent Native politician and member of Alaska’s House of Representatives. The contributors, most of whom are Alaska Natives, include scholars, political leaders, activists and artists.