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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Beautifully Written Memoir, the Perfect Looking for Myself in Alaska Story, May 9, 2009
This review is from: Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska (Hardcover)
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This book enters the fairly glutted genre of Alaskan autobiographies. Homer Alaska probably ranks behind only Hollywood and DC for inspiring memoirs. A quick glance at my bookshelf found Fishcamp Life on an Alaskan Shore, As Far As You Can Go Without A Passport: The View From The End Of The Road and Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man all featuring life in Homer and the journeys that led there. So can there be another deserving personal story about finding a home in Homer? Apparently yes.
Homer has a strange draw in that it is the "End of the road." But the key point is that it is still on the road so you can live a "frontier life" and still get a McDonald's hamburger. I've been fortunate to visit the city annually for the last twelve years (about the same time period the author writes about) and where my writing has been practical - where can you find a public shower type stuff - Weiss uses painterly strokes to paint the town, the landscape and Alaskan lifestyles, carefully rendering the joys and warts of living in Alaska.
The author's tale is bittersweet, being charmed by what Alaska has to offer but always showing an undertone of human failure. She dives into set net salmon fishing, only to have someone vandalize their nets while they are gone. Or they visit the Russian Colonists at the end of the East Road who live a private, utopian lifestyle, but when they get to the end of the road, they find trespassing signs and a littered beach. Even her relationship with her boyfriend is haunted by a human failure that cannot be overwhelmed by the dream of living in Alaska.
Like many people coming to Alaska, Weiss' dream seemed to resonate in an empty spot within her. This is by no means unique story, but it is a well told one. It is a personal journey toward finding a woman's own worth and purpose while discovering what I feel is one of the most amazing corners of our continent. I think for a lot of people who come to the state, this is their experience. Maybe it should be required reading for anyone heading north to find a simpler life to answer personal troubles.
Weiss impressively catalogs the changes that have taken place in the area whether they are seasonal, or cultural like the shift from fishing village to retirement location. She creates an amazing sense of place which made the book a joy to read.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Slow Journey, May 28, 2009
This review is from: Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska (Hardcover)
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In life, the things we most desire generally come to us at the precise moment we stop trying to find them. When I was reading Miranda Weiss' TIDE, FEATHER, SNOW, I was often reminded of this stark and annoying fact. Weiss' book about her life in "America's last frontier", Alaska, tries very hard to be literary, philosophical, and profoud. It tends to succeed mainly at the moments when Weiss is distracted by her own story, and drops the strained effort to impress the reader with her extremely Literary prose style. Did his happen enough to make it worth buying and reading? That depends a great deal on your own personal tastes.
Like George Bailey's GERMANS, TIDE is the chronicle of an obsession: in this case, with the Alaskan wilderness, which has fascinated Weiss her whole life. The book is not merely a physical journey, describing the intense culture-shock which Alaska brings on newcomers, even those like Wiess that fancied themselves outdoors-types, or a travelogue about the glaciers, forests, rivers she encountered, or even a study of the wildlife, though it is all these things; it's an emotional diary, depicting how living in Alaska awakened her to the rhythms of life and nature, to the perils of existence past the edge of civilization, and to the dangers of environmental destruction. The book is meticulously and thoroughly written, taking time to "smell the roses", which in this case are things like adlers, flights of cranes, spawning salmon, 23-hour nights, immense snowfalls, and a community spirit which is almost nonexistent in the rest of America. It takes a great fascination with the process of life and existence itself, a la Ernst Junger, and the style occasionally wanders into the prose-poetical, a la St. Exupery. Because of this, however, TIDE, while full of insight, is not easy on the eyes. It is often slow and sometimes ponderous, solemn and occasionally grim, and I found it very hard to shake the feeling that Weiss was trying too hard to move the reader. That sense of strained grandiosity (which this review may share, but reading Weiss puts me in that mood, I guess) is the enemy of easy reading, and indeed, TIDE was a book I had to really bear down on to get through. In a writer, whatever her other gifts, that's a hard sin to forgive.
So I give TIDE a reluctant three stars. Reluctant, because Weiss' has important and sometimes beautiful things to say, and hard-won wisdom to pass on; three stars (and not four) because of the particular way she said those things. It's my hope that her next outing, if there is one, will be a more relaxed, natural piece of work, with less signs of stress on it than this.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Tide is High, May 9, 2009
This review is from: Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska (Hardcover)
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The most appealing aspect about TIDE, FEATHER, SNOW: A LIFE IN ALASKA is the very descriptive voice that author Miranda Weiss uses to describe her experience in Homer, Alaska. Weiss's decision was not a spur of a moment calling but something that had been living and breathing in her psyche since childhood when she assembled a 43-page research project on the state of Alaska when she was in fifth grade that also included creating a Baked Alaska as well as taking a hiking trek to the Blue Ridge Mountains as a teenager that remained a constant reminder. But Weiss describes it best: "a long slow ache" (28). Destiny may have brought her to the state known as "The Last Frontier." However, this would be a frontier where she would have to adjust and adopt to the small-town quaintness, the wilderness, living off the land, dealing with day and night, and still struggling to leave the life she left behind in the Maryland suburbs.
As one reads each passage from the book, one can almost see and smell the landscape that Weiss vividly shows. Alaska may be the last frontier with parts of the state still appearing untouched, and with Weiss's several encounters with various living sea creatures, Humback whales, rockfish, salmon, and mussels for viewing or for foraging for food, this was her life; she saw the beauty of nature right before her eyes. But also situated within Weiss's narrative are layers of the historical and cultural background of the people of the Kachemak Bay region that is rich with remnants of Native cultures and settlements of the Sugpiaq, Alutiiq, Den'ina Athabascan and origins of expansionist activity in Alaska by the Russians during the 1700s and other historical tidbits.
TIDE, FEATHER, SNOW is an enticing book. It is a combination of memoir and nature writing that may be compared to other books that fall under this genre, such as John Muir's narratives about living or being in touch with nature or "God's country." But in between the enthralling descriptions, Weiss shows that change is inevitable in all aspects of life that also includes the nature of things.
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