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Looking for Alaska

Amazon.com Price:  $7.92 (as of 06/05/2019 11:04 PST- Details)

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Description

More than twenty years ago, a disillusioned college graduate named Peter Jenkins set out with his dog Cooper to look for himself and his nation. His memoir of what he found, A Walk Across America, captured the hearts of millions of Americans.

Now, Peter is a bit older, married with a family, and his journeys are different than they were. Perhaps he is searching for adventure, perhaps inspiration, perhaps new communities, perhaps unspoiled land. Certainly, he found all of this and more in Alaska, America’s last wilderness.

Looking for Alaska is Peter’s account of eighteen months spent traveling over twenty thousand miles in tiny bush planes, on snow machines and snowshoes, in fishing boats and kayaks, on the Alaska Marine Highway and the Haul Road, on the lookout for what defines Alaska. Hearing the amazing stories of many real Alaskans–from Barrow to Craig, Seward to Deering, and in all places in between–Peter gets to know this place in the way that only he can. His resulting portrait is a rare and unforgettable depiction of a dangerous and beautiful land and all the people that call it home.

He also took his wife and eight-year-old daughter with him, settling into a “home base” in Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, coming and going from there, and hosting the rest of their family for extended visits. The way his family lived, how they made Alaska their home and even participated in Peter’s explorations, is as much a part of this story as Peter’s own travels.

All in all, Jenkins delivers a warm, funny, awe-inspiring, and memorable diary of discovery-both of this place that captures all of our imaginations, and of himself, far and wide again.

In 1999, Peter Jenkins and his family left their farm in Tennessee to live in Alaska for a few seasons, eventually renting a house in Seward, Alaska (pop. 2,830) on the Kenai Peninsula. The principal aim of the commute was for Jenkins to write a travelogue, but he also saw it as an opportunity to end a period of personal stagnation. It seems that to have worked, for Looking for Alaska is filled with a vibrancy that can only come from one with a fully charged battery. Recognizing that “This giant place is filled with people determined to live as free as conceivable of others’ intervention,” he employed the same low-key approach to research that made his bestselling book A Walk Across America (1979) so engaging–he made friends wherever he went and allowed people to share their stories in their own way and in their own time. Part of Jenkins’s charm is that he never pretends that he’s figured the place out; he readily cops to his outsider status and invites readers to experience his sense of awe and surprise with him. All over his 18-month stay in the Last Frontier, Jenkins spent time with wildlife rangers, recreation guides, native whalers, fishermen, and dogsled mushers, all of whom showed Jenkins and his family glimpses of their own private Alaska. (They also shared their bear stories; it kind of feels nearly everyone in the state has had at least one run-in with the giant predator). “No one is ever the same after coming back from Alaska,” he writes and after reading his book, it’s easy to consider him. –Shawn Carkonen

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