Reading The River: A Voyage Down The Yukon | 
 enlarge | Author: John Hildebrand
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 583077
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 260
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0299154947
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.9860451
EAN: 9780299154943
ASIN: 0299154947
Publication Date: February 15, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Nothing TOO serious. Some general reading wear, crease on cover near spine, and some soiling/rippling of inscription and title page. Rest of the text is clean and unmarked. FAST shipping!!
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Product Description
John Hildebrand sets out in a canoe . . . to explore the great riverway of northwestern Canada and Alaska. . . . The geography is closely rendered and the characters especially sharply drawn. The country is filled with mad dropouts at river fish camps, good-hearted girls in the towns, sullen natives in tumbledown villages, cranky old-timers, terrible drunks and worse moralizers who live off the wild landscape and its abundant resources. . . . This is a fine work, and Hildebrand is a fine writer.Charles E. Little, Wilderness For many of us the North has been the one place where a certain elemental experienceof land, water, and peoplecan still be had. John Hildebrands personal account of this experience has a particular freshness and poignancy. It is the record of a journey, as much inward as it is outward, and all the better for that.John Haines, author of The Stars, The Snow, The Fire A finely written account of coming to terms with ones self, of the realities of ones dreams. Recommended for anyone who would follow Thoreau into the woods, even now.Library Journal Hildebrand has every skill of mind and craft to enfold us in his experience.The New Yorker
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Loved it! July 13, 2006
Denali (PA, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I loved this book and enjoyed every page. I've been reading a lot of Alaskan/Northern frontier books and this is definitely one to put at the top of the list. The different people John met on his trip were fascinating. It's told in such a flowing and easy style, that you don't want to put it down. By the end, I envied not being able to take a trip like this myself.
 Reading the River: A Voyage Down the Yukon October 3, 2005
Roger Grant (Maple Hts., Ohio USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
One of the better books I have read over the summer.
Engaging and true to the Yukon I remember June 3, 2005
Mark E. Baxter (Layton, UT United States)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book is the story of a motorized canoe trip down most of the Yukon River in the late 1980's. The author had spent some years in Alaska years before and built a cabin in the bush with his then wife. 10 years later, he returned to the North, recently divorced and went from Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory Canada, west across Alaska to the mouth of the Yukon River in the Bering Sea.
This book is not a mile-by-mile description of landscape and campsites. Rather it mostly concerns the current inhabitants of the area and the history of the area. It is well-written and does not contain any "world's greatest" claims. (You know, the claims in many travel books that a certain place is the prettiest, biggest, greenest, or ugliest place in the world.) Such honesty is refreshing.
Having spent one summer on the upper Yukon in Canada and parts of other years, I can tell you this book catches the ambience of the area perfectly - from the Indians (now called "first nations" in Canada in PC talk) to the miners to the malcontents trying to get away from it all. I found it wonderfully evocative and representative of the people who live up there. If you've ever read Robert Service's "Spell of the Yukon" you will understand when I say this work is a book-length treatment of the same subject - the strange lure of the North.
I'll close with a couple of excerpts from Service that will give you a sense of the place and the book.
"No, There's the land, Have you seen it?
It's the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when he made it -
Some say it's a fine land to shun.
Maybe, but there's some as would trade it
For no land on earth, and I'm one.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning,
It twists you from foe to a friend,
It seems it's been since the beginning,
It seems it will be to the end.
There's a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where.
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair.
There are hardships that nobody reckons,
There are valleys unpeopled and still.
There's a land, oh it beckons and beckons.
And I want to go back and I will"
Read this if you've ever felt the urge to go North and you'll get a feel for it.
Excellent. A marvel of a tale. April 8, 2004
Mary Hansen (Oregon)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful
Having once been an Alaskan traveler myself, I found myself slightly skeptical before plucking this tattered book off the shelf. Everything I'd read of modern Alaska seemed wrong, off-key, and too liberal or too commercialized. But after skimming through a few pages, I was hooked. Never before have I found such wonderful, accurate descriptions of the land, its people, and the emotional tracks it leaves on a person. Somehow, I assumed I was alone in my journeys and my memoirs of Alaska, and unable to share them with people. Here is a man who has weaved together a beautiful adventure, honest and simple. I felt as though I was reading a diary of my own excursions in the North. Reading the River is definitely one of the best books I have ever read. I recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered what draws people away from the city, for those living in the city who craves the wild, and to every dreamer, explorer, and 'old-timer'.
Unexpected Treasure March 24, 2004
Paul Atreides (CA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
A complete surprise. Much more than a travelogue or river guide. Excellent prose from a gifted writer. One of the best books I've read in years.
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