McPhee's deep dive into Alaska. It consists of three unequal parts: the first two parts concern a canoe trip in the Brooks Range by a group to locate sites to protect as national wilderness, etc. The second is about a plan to move the state capital from Juneau. The third part, and more than half the book, is a deep dive into the people of "the country," land surrounding the Yukon river near the Canadian border near the town of Eagle and its native counterpart, Eagle Village. McPhee lived there and his descriptions of the people living there, their views, and their politics, is a masterpiece. Although the book is a bit historical now (it was published in 1977) and led me to look at Wikipedia to get an update on the issues discussed in the book, it is still a masterpiece of literary nonfiction.

The big gave you a great sense Alaska is by focusing on the smallest piece of a large piece of land and allowing you to extrapolate outwards. All the characters are dynamic and fascinating and how they all fit together starts to give you a 360 degree view. However, I read the book over an extended period of time and at moments it could be easy to get lost in a side stories side story. Second, I am curious on how some of these thoughts have changed since the book was written.

There are times this book felt like a slog but then I remembered how large Alaska is, like its own country, and realized McPhee just needed the space. Take time to get into it, characters will come and go, but really you're here for the land. The writing is gorgeous, especially when he's talking about the carcass of a bear. This work of nonfiction is no doubt dated (published in 1976) but a master work, like all other McPhee. I look forward to reading more of his books. There are so many to choose from. My husband's favorite is Annals Of The Former World (rocks!) but I might swing towards The Pine Barrens as I grew up in South Jersey. Writing about nature sounds easy, could be really boring, but in fact is just as hard as all other writing because of those very factors. McPhee does it with grace, interest, and without judgment of the people he befriends, who teach him about Coming Into The Country and life in Alaska. I can't wait to visit The Last Frontier. This book is a compelling argument that everything is interesting and all stories deserve to be told.

Fantastic book, in effect an exceptionally long New Yorker article about Alaska in the 1970s, a period and topic I knew basically nothing about. Also, perhaps somewhat unintentionally, today the interviews read as a fascinating peek into white settler ideology and culture at its most deranged, particularly those characters who "live on the land" (actually working seasonally in extractive industries or selling gold or furs to metropolitan populations), hate the federal government and environmentalists, and view themselves as "more Indian" than the indigenous people whose land they settle on. A rewarding read, especially today.

The best of all the many books written by Outsiders about Alaska.

A book about Alaska at a meaningful turning point in the state's history, after huge deals at the national level regarding drilling, land ownership, settler rights, and more. Alaska was in the midst of pivoting from a wild territory to a state with big business, and McPhee captures much of this. Here's a quote from the book that illustrates the theme:

That, for Stanley, has been a bewildering disappointment. When he was born, in 1950, the country was open and free. Expectations were that when he grew up he could live where he pleased. Then Alaska became a state. Oil was discovered. Homesteading ended. In the great reappointment of Alaskan land, the squares seemed to be moving as well as the checkers. Stanley, who had always been at ease with all aspects of this place and latitude, now found himself feeling more than uneasy. A government many thousands of miles away had "frozen" the land with printed words. It was settling forty million acres on Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians, but for his future it offered little more than atrophy, a narrowing of what he once might have looked upon as his birthright opportunity. He could not comprehend this. He was a native, too.

The Book takes place in 3 parts. The first, my favorite, is McPhee traveling way out in the bush with a few naturalists. The second is about the birth of urban Alaska, and state politics. The third, and my least favorite, was largely about Eagle Alaska, including the local politics, relationship with the native americans present, and so forth.

The best thing about the entire book is, of course, McPhee's writing. He could write a menu and it would be a delight to read. His descriptive power, unexpected humor and timing, and structure are just amazing.

Here are a couple pretty funny quotes about mosquitoes, each separated by hundreds of pages from the other:

Having had one bad night with insects, we next choose to pitch our tents far out on a gravel point, on a dry part of the riverbed, two hundred yards from the nearest blade of vegetation, confident that the water will not rise, and preferring anyway to be drowned outright than consumed piecemeal.
...
We stopped one night at an abandoned cabin, containing so much clutter of junk debris that we decided to sleep outside. Mosquitoes were dense there but tolerable -- not yet coming in clouds. In the Yukon Flats, beyond the mountains, were thirty-six thousand lakes and ponds, with geese, canvasbacks, scaup, cranes, swans, teal, and widgeons in millions, and mosquitoes in numbers a physicist would understand.

The only reason this is 4 of 5 stars is that the third part of the book, its longest, kind of dragged for me at parts. I wasn't that interested in the small town politics that he was capturing, even if they were representative of the overall theme.

It took me a year and a half to read this book about the singular ways of life in Alaska. It was prep for an "exceeds expectations" small-boat cruise I took in SE Alaska in June 2022, and as I read it during passage through the Eastern Fjords, Glacier Bay, Chatham Strait, Behm Canal and more some of the sections of Mr. McPhee's 1977 book were jibing with where I was traveling. I didn't get to the Yukon, but still. Nice serendipity.

This is, in most ways, a history book, a sociological study, and a lot of pretty elegiac writing about a place and time that is consigned to the past. Some of the stories and themes McPhee explores go much further back into earlier 20th Century Alaska as well. A *lot* of testosterone, and a fair amount of tension between naturalists, environmentalists, native peoples, explorers, developers and others all vying for a piece of the 49th State.

Since it took me 18 months to read "Coming Into the Country" my current memory about a lot of the book is rather hazy, but regardless, it is a worthy piece of writing and a worthy introduction to Alaska of the previous century and to a vanishing if not vanished way of life.

Considered quintessential McPhee for a reason! What a rich and witty and observant portrait of Alaska’s natural and human world in mosaic. I’ll never see Anchorage any other way than this: “Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.”

McPhee must have spent some time in Eagle, his descriptions of the persons here are an excellent representation of the range of characters inhabiting rural Alaska. His discussion of Alaska history since statehood is a very good introduction. It reads like a journal, and likely much of it is. I found it easy to follow as a longtime Alaskan, but I can understand that it may present o pretty confused picture and maybe that was his intent ;-)

I liked the first part of the book the best, because I enjoyed traveling in my mind to beautiful remote places that John McPhee went to, hearing the stories of bear encounters from the men he travelled with—all things I am unlikely to ever see in person myself.

A lot of the middle and end of the book are super entitled arrogant white men mouthing off craziness. People who believed things like: the U.S. purchase of Alaska was unconstitutional, therefore white men like them should be able to take whatever land they want, mine whatever minerals and oil they want. Seriously, one of these men planned to sue the U.S. government because to him the purchase was unconstitutional. Did they want the land given back to the original inhabitants? (Alaska indigenous people). No. Given back to Russia from whom it was purchased? No. It should go to white men like them. Because they said so. OMG.

Other men promised to shoot any Federal servant who came onto their land, no matter that such a person would simply be doing their job. The white people who lived by trapping and hunting and other subsistence activities looked down on the local indigenous population for living a subsistence lifestyle or living only for “today” (which frankly, they weren’t even correct about; Indians have always cached ahead for the winter and other forethought actions). I can’t even describe all the arrogant, self-absorbed, entitled craziness he records in this book. It went on and on and on. He interviews almost no indigenous people or environmentalists or Federal employees to provide a different perspective. I know that McPhee’s shtick is to record the opinions of out-there characters, as I have read many of his books. But just because someone has an opinion, doesn’t mean you need to give it a massive platform at great length.

I read this slowly and luxuriously over the last three months, taking full advantage of John McPhee’s prose. This classic trio of pieces on Alaska, written and first published during the 1970s, were pure delight and my first taste of his work. I have to admit to buying it on a whim and for the lovely Daunt Books reprint cover, but I’ll certainly be coming back to McPhee for more. There are moments of stagnation, particularly in the longest piece ‘Coming into the Country’ - too much talk of planes, machinery and such - but the observations of human life on the last American frontier kept me reading. I’m looking forward to his book about living for a year on a Scottish Croft next.

It is ten-thirty, and about time for bed. Everything burnable—and more, too—has long since gone into the fire. We burn our plastic freeze-dry bags and we burn our Swiss Miss cocoa packets. If we have cans—devilled ham, Spam—we burn them, until all hint of their contents is gone.

Please, don't burn garbage while camping. Aluminum foil, plastics, styrofoam and batteries don't just disappear when burned. Burning food residue from unlined cans and packing them out is ok, though. What's Burning in Your Campfire? Garbage In, Toxics Out. (or if you prefer, pdf format)

You might also enjoy:
✱ Kings of the Yukon (highly recommended)
✱ The Lonely Land (highly recommended)
✱ Made of Salmon: Alaska Stories from the Salmon Project
✱ Tip of the Iceberg
✱ Two in the Far North
✱ The Only Kayak
✱ Rhythm of the Wild
✱ Rowing to Latitude
✱ Passage to Juneau
✱ Arctic Dreams
✱ Crossing Open Ground
✱ One Man's Wilderness
✱ The Good Rain