Customer Reviews

Koviashuvik: Making a Home in the Brooks Range

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I didn't like this book at all.

The prose, as noted in other reviews here, is weird -- like an endless entry in a Bad Hemingway Contest.

There's relatively little sense of what it's like, day by day, to live a subsistence lifestyle in the Brooks Range.

Wright seems to take the attitude that he's morally and intellectually superior to people who don't live as he does -- people still swimming in the mainstream of society.

And, it's worth noting, his lifestyle in the Brooks Range is altogether dependent on products from the material culture he professes to disdain. As he mentions at one point, the necessities are a gun, a knife, and an ax. Plus (as he doesn't mention) a Bush plane to bring in the mail and supplies, and check up on him and his wife from time to time.

But, in the end, I think it's his faux-Hemingway prose that offends me most. Here's my own nomination for a passage that is really stupid, yes, it is, it is really stupid:

"It is a disturbing thing not to know. When you want to know it is disturbing not to know. Even though there are some things we do not want to know, like what our children taste like boiled."

Stan Jones
Anchorage, Alaska

I was hoping to find out more about life in the Brooks Range. Be warned! This is not a travelogue, or account of life in the Brooks Range, at least not more than a superficial account. This book is chock full, full to overflowing, with sentences of the following ilk: "It was a strange experience to visit the United States when you are living in the United States but not really in the United States, because people in America did not think of us as really being in the United States. But we are. Yes, we really are."

That was taken from a random page. I could have given a better example if my purpose in writing this were anything greater, but it is not. No. It is not. Oops, I'm talking like the author. I get it, of course, but it becomes too much.

Other gripes: Extended periods of time spent in the U.S. (as it were) and Britain described.

This book is Sam Wright's personal meditation. Some people will be interested in that. I was looking for information on the Brooks Range, and while some is given, the quantity is quite small considering a 200+ page book.

Sam Wright takes us to Kovishutok and his Koviashuvik through a prose that at first was halting in its simplicity. As one reads on, as it is clear one reviewer did not, the lithe of the language carries the story telling of native speach and perceptions. I have lived through this evolution of myths and new myths, but seldom have I read an odessy that contains insight, pathos, empathy, and as an aside, a love story with Sam's wife Billie. The Brooks range and Alaska come alive, are described in brillant detail, and historicaly chronicalized. I am a little closer to Koviashuvik in my own life for having read this book.

Sam and Billie lived in the Brooks Range in a 12 by 12 cabin, summer and winter for a dozen years. Sam's story is more than a cronicle of subsistence living in America's last great wilderness. Sam reintroduces us as a human community to a life that we have known but has been lost in our modern context. He asks questions that many of us are asking about our relationship to each other and the natural world. It is truly a spiritual journey. If you like Sam's book you might also like Billie Wright's book, Four Season's North, written about their first year in the far north.

If you want a much better read, try "Four Seasons North" by Billie Wright, Sam's late wife. Her writing is vastly superior to Sam's and you get a better sense of their life on the Brooks Range. The book has been out of print for quite awhile, but worth the search for a used copy.

I had to put the book down it was so bad.