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Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska
Current price:
$28.00
Publication Date: June 1st, 2008
Publisher:
Milkweed Editions
ISBN:
9781571313010
Pages:
256
Description
Growing up in the Arctic, pragmatic, simple questions had useful answers. And frostbite was a way of life. In Shopping for Porcupine, Seth Kantner returns to the setting of his debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, with a fascinating account of life on North America's last frontier.
In these essays and photographs, Kantner chronicles the "by-hand times so recently passed," watching through the lens of his life the transformation of the Arctic as mainstream America moves relentlessly north. His story begins with the arrival of his father, Howard Kantner, to this world in the 1950s and ends with Kantner, a grown man, settled in the same landscape. "My memory begins under snow," he writes, recalling his early and longstanding respect for the old I upiaq ways, cold nights on caribou hides, swimming in the ice floes for wounded waterfowl, and fur-clad travelers stopping with their dog teams for visits.
Bracing and humorous, perceptive and profoundly illuminating, this extraordinary collection offers an ode to respect--that oft-forsaken, unromantic quality--for the land, for animals, and for "something as virtuous as gathering food."
Praise for Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska
"Fascinating essays, marvelous photographs. As he did with his remarkable novel, Ordinary Wolves, Seth Kantner illuminates an Alaska most of us will never know." Andrea Barrett
"This book is full of stunning images, and only some of them are in the photos. Others are in the narrative accounts of traditions colliding, subsistences overlapping, dilemmas mounting. It's all quite unforgettable." Bill McKibben
"One of the most beautiful books you'll ever read--truthful, raw, and lovely. The photographs make the sparse arctic Alaskan landscape monumentally visible and profound, while Kantner's writing imparts heroic dignity to the lives around him. From a childhood spent in a time when 'Frostbite was a way of life' to an adulthood fiercely lived, the tale of this man's life is original and funny, vivid and touching. As tough as caribou hide, Kantner enthralls the reader from beginning to end. This book is bound to become a classic alongside the works of Loren Eiseley, Edward Abbey, and John McPhee." Jonis Agee
"With Ordinary Wolves, Seth Kantner came streaking up out of the Arctic tundra like a blazing meteor in reverse. If it isn't the best novel to come out of Alaska so far, I don't know what is. Now, with his new collection of autobiographical vignettes and photographs, we get a closer look at the unique upbringing that informs that fine work. He brings us into the wildest scenes as only someone of this place can do. For all the popularity of the recent best sellers and hit movies about Alaska, Shopping for Porcupine comes from a place you haven't seen yet and can hardly imagine." Dan O'Neill
"Shopping For Porcupine brings the searing honesty, lyric style, and raw emotional power we've come to anticipate from this home-grown Alaska prodigy. In Ordinary Wolves, you glimpsed Seth Kantner's life between the words. Here, you meet it head-on." Nick Jans
