A Land Gone Lonesome

A literary kin of John Muir's Travels in Alaska and John McPhee's Coming into the Country , A Land Gone Lonesome is the book on Alaska for the new century. Though he treks through a beautiful and hostile wilderness, the heart of O'Neill's story is his exploration of the lives of a few tough souls clinging to the old ways-even as government policies are extinguishing their way of life. More than just colorful anachronisms, these wilderness dwellers-both men and women-are a living archive of North American pioneer values. As O'Neill encounters these natives, he finds himself drawn into the bare-knuckle melodrama of frontier life-and further back still into the very origins of the Yukon river world. With the rare perspective of an insider, O'Neill here gives us an intelligent, lyrical-and ultimately, probably the last-portrait of the river people along the upper Yukon.