Customer Reviews

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska--Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal

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Of the many wilderness adventures that flood our view on the television or in movies, with dramatic, life-risking events, we can become weary of the slick presentations. Rockwell Kent tells of us of another type of adventure, the day to day living on remote Fox Island off Seward, in Alaska. The small pleasures, the difficult trips in an open boat to get supplies, the child's sweetness in his friendship with a magpie, all these and more stories are told in a daily journal. And illustrated as Kent always does, with insight and style. Kent as a writer is equal to Kent as an artist, intellectual and candid in his telling a story and sharing impressions. If this is your first reading of a Kent book, you have a long list of other books ahead for this was his first book done as a "first person" storyteller. His desire for remote and wild landscapes to paint took him, and then takes us, through his work, to many other places over many decades. But none are any more delightful and majestic than this trip to Alaska. To check out the validity of this remote place, I took a trip to Fox Island several years ago, and though I didn't see it in the winter as Rockwell and his son did, it was dramatic, beautiful and matched the feeling I'd gotten when I first read the book years ago. The nice touch of this edition is that the editor, Doug Capra, has a very fine introduction to the book and Capra knows his subject. He has been researching Kent for years, but more than that, he has something to say and says it well. Few Kent editors do. But the book--it makes a wonderful Christmas gift because it has a really fine description of what a meaningful Christmas celebration can be in a remote place, shared with a hermit on the island, the father and little boy. There are some delightful details in this story: the food taken for the trip; the books for father and son; the rigerous baths when the bay freezes and the ice cold waters no longer are available. Kent is no ordinary artist, writer or father. And this is no ordinary adventure. It makes you wish, even yearn, for that place, that time, those people. I knew Rockwell Kent in the final few years of his life and he still carried that energtic view of life, that love of beauty and nature that comes alive in this small work. And three cheers to Doug Capra for bringing this new edition to life for it is of the quality for which Kent was famous in his published books. (A wretched edition of this treasure of a story was published a few years before and this edition puts to rest a Kent lover's dispair about having a bad edition of a Kent work on the shelves, any shelves. I almost never throw books away but this earlier paperback with bad design from cover to cover merits polluting a garbage pail.) So, invest in some good reading, some laughs and some wistful thoughts about what a wilderness adventure could be. And for those who have courage, still can be.

You can pick this book off your library shelf any time, open it to any page, start at any paragraph and begin to feel a mantle of peace settle over your jangled nerves. "Wilderness" is the record of artist Rockwell Kent and his 9-year-old son spending a winter in Alaska on Fox Island in Resurrection Bay, near Seward, with only one elderly Swede as a neighbor. This "journal of quiet adventure" nonetheless is exciting in the relationships between father and son and old Olson and between the Kents and the harsh winter weather. Beautifuly and profusely illustrated by Rockwell and Rockwell, Jr.

Unlike the true frontiersmen (ie; Dick Proenneke, One Man's WIlderness or James Huntington, On The Edge of Nowhere), this man is a typical anti-establishment artist who escaped to the outdoors in search of himself. His work reveals his own state of depression. It would be interesting to know what became of his son.

A wonderful book. Except for the occasion, unknowing, encounters with Kent's illustrations--for Moby Dick, for Shakespeare, for Random House--I was completely unaware of Rockwell Kent or his work until the Portland (ME) Art Museum had a summer retrospective of his work--including paintings from the Pushkin Museum--a couple years ago. The immediately seized my imagination. They work much like the symphonies of Sibelius work, vast expanses of barren landscape, as intimidating as they are compelling. It was with such a background that I purchased Wilderness. What an intriguing story: a father goes to Alaska to paint (and create a set of illustrations for Nietsche's Zarathustra) and, with his wife's permission, takes their 9 year old son (also named Rockwell) along for the company and the sheer adventure of it. How amazing is that? How envious of the young Rockwell I am. What hay would I have made of such an opportunity to escape the world with my father for seven months on the verge of puberty and participate in an adventure I'd wonder at the rest of my life. No wonder the book was a best seller upon its publication (1920). No wonder the book was compared, hyperbolically I'll admit, to Whitman's Leaves of Grass in terms of its potential influence on American literature. The 1996 edition by Wesleyan University Press includes many additional illustrations, including some of young Rockwell's drawings and letters. Altogether, a very satisfying experience. It does exactly what it set out to do.

Make sure this is the last of the Rockwell Kent books you read....It is nothing in comparison to his others (I have not yet read Salamina). Self-exiled (somewhat) to an island south of Seward, AK with his 9-year-old son and an old Scandinavian down a piece, we see how this fellow slowly develops a case of apparent "cabin fever" (who wouldn't -- except his neighbor -- who has his goats to keep him company) His illustrations are so-so,and he seems to be increasingly fascinated with his son's nakedness, which he likes to sketch and load this book up with. We are told by him that he is constantly stretching canvases and painting, but we see only one painting on the cover of the book.

Rockwell Kent, for sure was a strange fellow, and I presume his interest in his son's anatomy is really an artistic one, but it does seem to become a bit of a fixation as the sojourn draws near and they make ready to return to wife and mother back in the lower 48. The book may be of interest to a psychologist studying human isolation and miserable weather, but for the rest, unless you are a devotee of naked children, it is not really worth the candle..

I found this book to be very informative about the land and extream weather of Alaska but it ran a little dry quickly. This is a journal of around 9 months of Rockwell kents life while in Alaska. I have read other books that were written from journals and Kents does fair better then most. I can understand that a journal in Alsaka can run out of new and interesting things to write about and this book seemed to try to fill in the gaps with Kents thoughts and many philosophies. All in all I do recomend this book to anyone who really want a real veiw of what Alaska is actually like.