Curtis’s Reviews > Alaska > Status Update

Feels very back-loaded--the hugest chapters are all at the end. Still readable, but a major marathon! Interlocking characters more complex as more carry through multiple chapters than before, & meet descendants of past characters. Still thinking about how books like this are conceived/organized, & how Michener will be able to wring a natural, unified 'ending' to this or if it'll just feel like a series of novellas.

Characters continuing across chapters now, & descendants of previous characters crop up. Book going back to the dispossession of First Nations, this time around fishing rights. I know something about this already & know it's gonna go back to being a bleak Bury-My-Heart-style tragedy, after the adventure chapters about gold. Hope to see some spine; book has too many bystander 'good guys.' Realistic, but frustrating!

Chapters on gold rush excellent, seemed like their own self contained novel. Great conveyance of distance & scale, beautiful passages of landscape descriptions (Tolkien-esque). The hunt for gold exciting, the village life turbulent; a lot to keep you reading. Unfortunately Michener uses racial slur term for geography in narrative, & dated dialogue/characterization also increasingly noticeable. Still pressing ahead :)

Part about Inuits not being able to do anything to a murderer because they don't have a jail or formal legal system is weird. First nations had communal justice & ways of punishing people, so they should have been able to handle it. Not sure if Michener is writing this section from a colonizer's perspective (he shifts between theirs and the first nation worldview) or if he's just unaware of community-based justice.

This chapter not as engaging as others; still decent. So interesting how people didn't care about Alaska swapping from Russian to American, and how little they'd explored it before just assuming it was worthless. Brutality against indigenous people has faded into background a bit but still ever present. Michener uses dated terms (Indian, shaman, tribe, Eskimo etc) but empathy lies primarily with them.

Always manages to keep both the epic of adventure in discovery as well as the horrors of colonialism in view at all times, by pivoting between perspectives, leaving you both impressed by the scale of the ambition & devastated by the brutality, wondering how, if possible, an equitable European arrival to the Americas could have gone. Having a bit of trouble readjusting each time we jump ahead, but still enjoying!

The brutality continues, but it's never salacious or overly descriptive. Written like a blow-by-blow in a news report. The summary style has led to characterization issues. I don't buy Sofia's conversion, or Trofim letting Innokenti get away with his brutality so long. Simple revising would have given better justification. Despite that, I'm a 4th into it and it hasn't dragged much at all, so still enjoying it!

Brutal, punishing chapter which felt like an entire novel on its own. Michener, though bordering on 'noble savage' tropes at times, is very empathetic to indigenous characters & the brutal dehumanizations of colonialism. His characters are somewhat simple but fleshed out enough to make you latch on. Able to play with suspense & tragedy while still giving you a lot of info. Inspires sense of awe at nature. Great.

Very accessible writing style, a tad bit '80s manly pulp,' with straightforward, basic prose. Feel like I'm learning a lot but am also invested in characters used to illuminate this history. Michener covers society's highest & lowest castes as characters, & I can separate fact from fiction pretty intuitively. So far each chapter is a separate story. Really enjoying it & curious to see how he develops this formula.

Series of parable-like stories about early indigenous arrivals in Alaska, culminating with the Aleutian people who named it. Good way of teaching reader about Alaska's terrain and different regions. Wonder whether Michener was imposing Eurocentric worldview on indigenous, though; at one point one insists the animals were put there for them to use--a Christian notion not usually found in indigenous culture. Still good