From Booklist
Lyrical northern essayist Jans, who evoked his life as an arctic schoolteacher in The Last Light Breaking, here turns to his avocation: spending time in the wilderness shooting animals--bearing a gun at first, and later, while never quite putting the gun down (there are, after all, bears out there), a camera. In this rangy collection of vignettes and photographs, he once again shows why he is one of Alaska's best writers. His style is sharp and poetic: "I leaned on hope like cold glass," he says of his emotions upon hearing that friends were lost on the tundra. He possesses unblinking bifocal vision, the ability to see the raw pain of arctic life and its overwhelming beauty simultaneously. Similarly, his photographs offer glimpses of the wild spaces that continue to call to Jans decades after he first encountered them. Many are drawn to the North, but few are chosen by it. Jans is one of those chosen. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Nick Jans' first two books, The Last Light Breaking and A Place Beyond, have received critical and popular acclaim. He has lived in and taught school in the Alaskan bush for almost 20 years. He and his wife reside in Juneau and Ambler, Alaska.
