Fishcamp Life on an Alaskan Shore [Paperback]

Nancy Lord (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2000

Nancy Lord celebrates a great good place-Cook Inlet, Alaska, where she and her partner have made a life together for more than twenty years.. With poetic cadence and magical tone, Lord writes of her life from June to August, days filled with the mending of nets, the muscle-wrenching labor of the catch, the exquisite pleasure of an improvised hot-tub, and the often subtle beauty of the inlet's flora and fauna.Woven throughout Lord's adventures is the deeper history of the region's stories and legends of the native Denaina people; anecdotes about past and current residents; and descriptions of their neighbors, both human and animal.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nancy Lord writes like an angel about the hard, often lonely, and always rewarding work of fishing along an agate-strewn Alaskan inlet, where she and her partner do what she calls the "sustaining work" of landing evasive salmon far less efficiently than do the neighborhood grizzly bears. That sustaining work grows ever more difficult, she writes, as it becomes more unusual for individual fishers to market their goods in the Lower 48, the province of large-scale food distributors and of the "pale imitation that packages well." Reading this lovely book may well make you hungry--and not a little envious of Lord, who seems to have found a little corner of paradise in the backwoods of the far north. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"If you ever dreamed of chucking it all to become a fisherman in Alaska, Fishcamp will make your dreams more vivid." -- Sue Halpern

"These pages teem with provocative ideas about wild country, its uncertain place in the world, and the way landscape can shape a life...[Lord] is a wonderful writer, and this is a terrific book." -- Jon Krakauer

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1st Counterpoint paperback ed edition (April 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582430705
• ISBN-13: 978-1582430706
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,351,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Travel to Alaska for under $30. Read this book., August 19, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore (Hardcover)

I'm an admitted sucker for nature writing and natural history, but am often disappointed in what I find out there. Not so with Fishcamp. This is that one-in-a-thousand book that I've longed for since first reading Walden twenty years ago. Ms. Lord writes beautifully of her day-to-day life fishing with her partner on Cook Inlet. And the stories and legends of the Dena'ina people, as well as the lives of the fishermen who have come before, will not be easily forgotten. This is not sentimental philosophizing about summers in Alaska. It is clear, respectful, and humble writing that will, I hope, be read for years to come