Alaskan Travels: Far-Flung Tales of Love and Adventure

Hoagland has captured the restless adventuresomeness of our frontiersmen, and the riot of nature in its unspoiled glory. –John Irving

Alaskan Travels is much more than a travel book. It is the chronicle of a love affair, with a powerful landscape and a powerful woman- a wonderful double portrait. –Paul Theroux

One of the very best writers of his generation. –Saul Bellow

A writer born, a writer obsessed. –Alfred Kazin

Edward Hoagland is a strong, solid writer with a splendid feel for the intricacy, queerness and stubborn pertinacity of life. He is also, so far as i know, the best essayist working in our perishing republic. –Edward Abbey

Hoagland’s genius is being in touch with both the natural world and his own life… He is that rare animal, an unpedantic essayist, and like his greatest predecessors he has found a way to turn self-consciousness into a fine art. –Paul Theroux

No contemporary essayist sifting through his own experience can match the unadomed clarity of Hoagland’s voice. –The Los Angeles Times

Edward Hoagland is a natural. His essays flow like running water, pure and clear. –Studs Terkel

Literally, we are plunged and immersed in the Yukon or Yemen or Belize and made not only to experience it and hear about it but to absorb and understand it. –Wallace Stegner

The Thoreau of our time, an essayist so personal, so sharp-eyed and deep-sighted, so tender and tough, lyrical and elegiac, as to transmute a simple stroll into a full-blown mystical experience. –Washington Post Book World

He’s at his best…when he circles a subject from many vantage points, teasing and digressing, piling up gorgeously angled syntaxes and frank admissions…hallmarks of a true essayist… it’s good to have this courageous account…contemplating the landscape of old age and mortality. –Phillip Lopate, The New York Review of Books (of Sex and the River Styx)

…The best book to date by a writer I regard as one of America’s very best, and quite possibly its most original, since Thoreau himself. –Howard Frank Mosher from his foreword to Alaskan Travels

Hoagland inserts historical facts about the towns and cities he visited, and he provides plenty of appealing natural descriptions of a wondrous landscape. A pleasing combination of personal essays and reflections, a love story and a naturalist’s view of one of the last unspoiled lands. –Kirkus Reviews

Hoagland has captured the restless adventuresomeness ofour frontiersmen, and the riot of nature in its unspoiled glory.

–John Irving

To read two pages of Hoagland at random is to know immediately that you are in the hands of a supremely tough-minded man and a man of perfect honesty.