Customer Reviews

The Blue Bear: A True Story of Friendship, Tragedy, and Survival in the Alaskan Wilderness

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was driving around, running errands on a hot June day, when I stumbled across a National Public Radio talk show on which Lynn Schooler was promoting this book. By the time it was over, I was at the nearest bookstore, sipping a cup of coffee and reading the first chapter of The Blue Bear.
Schooler is a natural-born story-teller and his knowledge and love of the Alaskan wilderness make every paragraph glow with authenticity.
Like most good books, the Blue Bear can be enjoyed and appreciated on many different levels: it's a wonderful adventure story, it captures the precious qualities of friendship and it encapsulates Schooler's life-affirming world view in a way that is powerful, but never preachy.

This book had more impact on me than anything I've read in the past few years. I've never especially wanted to see Alaska (too cold) and never appreciated it as a special place, but Lynn Schooler's writing pulled me in to the land and its enchanting forms of life and interesting residents. I kept thinking how brave he was to write as he did about his demons and pains and the healing he painfully found, as elusive for most of us as the Blue Bear itself. I taught classic English literature for years, and I know powerful, gripping language when I see it. This is the real thing. If I could write to Schooler, I'd tell him how moving his book was. Read it right away, and slowly.

This book is true literature. The authors discriptions are very visual. I could not put the book down. It is more than just an adventure book. It is a story of true intimacy,personal discovery and tragedy. Schooler opens himself to the reader as if he is sharing his personal intermost secrets to his closest friend. It changed my life.

The Blue Bear is one of the best and most concise expressions of the meaning of life that I have ever read since Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Especially Schooler's experience with the Kingfisher and the crows. It's a beautiful story about love and friendships between man and nature, man and himself, and man and God, however one envisions Him. I could not put the book down once I started to read it. Schooler's quotes from Michio's book seemed to hold a very personal message for me.

The librarian said that she thought I might like this book because it was about bears. She was totally correct but not just because it was about bears. It is like spending years in Alaska with a knowledgable friend. Eye opening in so many ways. Best book on Alaska since "Coming into the Country".
Mr Schooler has included everything he knows into this book and all is very interesting. Highly reccomend it.

This is a beautiful book. Every personal and public library would be enriched by a copy. I wish I could buy 1000 copies and donate them myself.

The story is a deeply-felt, tragic tribute to the universal themes embodied by a single man, Japanese photographer Michio Hoshino, but more particularly, by a powerful friendship. The author explores the significance of human connection in all its painful and exhilarating manifestations. His landscape is not only the Alaskan frontier, but also the rifts, chasms, towers and summits of his own life. His treatment of both geographies is intense, humble, deft and intimate. This is a story of survival and triumph that is timeless and applicable to the life experience of everyone. This is a book of a lifetime that can change you for the better... if you let it.

A wonderful story of friendship, loss, growth, introspection, wilderness, devastation, change, art -- all the facets of life that make our lives poignant, painful and ultimately worthwhile. It's also a beautifully written homage to Michio Hoshino, the nature photographer, who slowly brings Schooler out of his shell to rediscover himself. Only then is Schooler able to look back at his life's events and work through them, to face his own loneliness. Other reviewers may be disappointed by this book but they did not read it for its OWN merits. So what if it doesn't mimic other books about Alaska? It's not supposed to and it shouldn't. This is its own book, its own story. Well worth reading. Lynn is a fascinating person, an excellent writer. Wherever you are, Lynn, you have a fan on the other side of the country who wishes you hope and happiness.

Lynn Schooler has personal attachment losses that are a part of everyone's life, but in the quite magnificent narrative of his awe for Michio Hoshino's life and art, and thrills of the hunt for this glacier bear, he gives us a grand picture of southeast Alaska, it's beauty and dangers, and his own foibles. Even if one didn't care for the audulation for Hoshino (I did), the story is a must read for its adventure and autobiographic detail of "the guy who cannot commit" to people, but can and does to a remarkable part of the world.

Elegiac is the perfect word to describe both the cadence and direction of this book: somber, straightforward, yet filled with joy. We come to know both men -- the author and the late Michio Hoshino -- through dialogue and description that is utterly natural, yet weighted with meaning. Pivotal scenes are described so elegantly that you want to read them again and again to extract every nuance of mood. Small vignettes speak volumes, such as the visit of the two men to a village where hundreds of native women and children died by starvation due to a US government relocation program. Or the choice of the author to pilot the boat away from Hobart because he could not bear the sight of the ravaged hillsides.
The author's lightness of touch is captivating especially because it is paired with such a deep knowledge and love of the flora, fauna and weather of the region. Reading Blue Bear, you become effortlessly acquainted with the Alaskan coast, as though it is indeed home, and come to mourn its slow, relentless destruction. I look forward to Lynn Schooler's next book.

a fascinating mixture of many interesting facts of Alaska and its natural history skillfully blended with the author's tale of personal tragedy and healing