The first two essays of the book are enjoyable and informative, as McPhee is ever. The meat is in the third, titular section. I sit now, in Fairbanks, 180 miles and nearly half a century downstream of the Eagle, AK, of which he writes. I haven't, yet, any personal data by which to evaluate the persistence of what he has described. McPhee stands out again for his descriptions of landforms, ecologies, and the short but incisive portraits of the humans who live atop the stage of the underlying geological drama.
His objective facade cracks in a few places to confess a strong empathy for the settlers that mine and trap this forbidding corner of the continent. Their mechanical ingenuity and hardiness seems no less impressive as a feat today—but I imagine many fewer people would now esteem the collateral destruction of tundra streams with gold-mining bulldozers and of lynx populations with Conibear steel-jaw traps. McPhee seems to find it hard to believe that so few people could do much damage upon a land so vast; with more hindsight, the position has not aged well.

A bit boring in some segments in the middle, but the book redeems itself with John McPhee's wonderful prose style and the fierce personalities of his subjects.

A really enjoyable historical insight into Alaskan life in the 1970's.

The book is divided into 3 sections. The first section is of McPhee's adventures in the wilderness, the second about the proposed move of the state capital to Janeau to a new site in the Fairbanks region. The final section consists of profiles of the individuals who live in Eagle, with details of their lives and the changes going on around them as Alaska lost its final frontier identity.

The first section is exceptional, the description of the landscape and his adventures is really absorbing.
The second section is partly interesting but goes on for way too long, especially considering it doesn't state the eventual outcome, despite this book being republished. A footnote at the end of the chapter would of been useful to compare this section to the collapse of the move.
The third section is really interesting and the profiles of the individual characters really gets to the understanding of their lives, to the native Indians and their marginalised place in an organised Alaska, where land is no owned, rather than a resource for all. Also the profile of the settlers, what they had escaped from in the mainland.
A good book overall, but is quite long in places, it has given me a really good understanding of Alaska and the changes it and its people were facing in the 1970's

Reading this book is like watching a campfire. There is a subtle enchanting beauty to it, but nothing actually happens. I know a lot more about Alaska and its origins now — thanks to McPhee’s writing, I feel like I’ve been there — but it was a slow burn (pun on the extended metaphor intended).

A year or two out of college I was employed at a bookshop in Seattle, earning little more than minimum wage. For a change of scene, I signed up with some friends to work the salmon season at a cannery in Alaska. It was rough work, seven days a week, 8am to 11pm (or to 1am on nights when you had cleanup duty). We didn’t get to see much of “real Alaska,” but you could feel it around you. The wilderness.

The cannery was located on an island in the southeast of the state. The town was small for anyplace other than Alaska, with not much more than a single road. The rest of the island was uninhabited. People wandering into the interior were sometimes never heard from again. No one went in search of them. It was assumed the wolves or bears had got them. The moss and muskeg would hide their bones.

Though I saw little of Alaska, it was enough to grasp its fascination. If my sense of it had faded some over the past twenty years, McPhee’s wonderful book has helped to revive it. I suddenly find myself scheming ways to get the wife and kids up north on vacation as soon as possible.

One of my college professors first introduced me to John McPhee. It was a writing course, and he was reading brief passages from one of McPhee’s books (I don’t recall which one), lingering over certain passages and expostulating on the genius of his prose, his crystalline expressions. McPhee is rarely flashy. There is no false posturing. He is curious, broad, but crisp, fresh, clear.

My former favorite of McPhee’s books (among those I have read) was Basin and Range, but Coming into the Country is just as good. The first part of it follows McPhee on an outing in the total wild of the Brooks Range. The second has to do with the politics of the state circa 1977. The third, and by far the longest, is the best. In it, McPhee lives with and among the trappers, the miners, the townspeople, the hippie kids and the Athapaskan natives of the Yukon River country near the Canadian border.

In this small but broadly scattered and loose-knit community, McPhee finds all the hope, discontent and anxiety of the human condition. It’s a parable (perhaps) of the riddling complexities that face us today, finding ourselves to be a part of the natural order and yet standing, somehow, outside of it.

The best book I’ve read this year.

I read this book in the mid-80's. I was encouraged to read it by a friend who had lived in Alaska in the early 80's and knew some of the people mentioned in the book. I remember I liked it and found it interesting but I don't remember too much about the details.

Might just be a masterpiece. Good thing I’m not 19 and coming off my first season in Yellowstone, I’d for sure have run off to Alaska and froze to death in the woods.

Three beautiful tableaus reflecting on a period of immense socio economic and environmental upheaval in one of the last true wildernesses. John McPhee’s prose is arresting and lyrical, whether describing the intricacies of land deals or the life cycle of a fish. Redoubling my efforts to get through Annals of the Former World now.

While written in the late 70s, its easy to imagine some of the issues and people McPhee writes of are somewhat unchanged, although the parkland has been set and the capitol never actually re-located. A fascinating glimpse at life up there by one of the best writers of his time, nonetheless this book comes off as slightly uneven with a middle section he was clearly less invested in. A must read for those interested in Alaska, however.

As my first foray into John McPhee's extensive catalogue, this was a tough one. His phrasing and sentence structure was, as expected, expertly curated, conveying information not just with his word choice, but also the pacing and organization of sentences and paragraphs. Coming Into the Country was over 400 pages of the controversy of how to manage Alaska as the final American frontier. He sourced opinions from federal land management, natives, and white, further subdivided into Alaskan born-and-raised and new arrivals. The portrayal of all opinions was even-handed and couched in the context from which they arose and the lives of the people from which they came. Overall, it was a well written piece, but I would recommend it primarily to those interested in the topic a priori.

This book is a somewhat lengthy discussion of three different aspects of Alaskan existence.  Although I have traveled to Alaska, I must admit that I am not very knowledgeable about its ways, although I have a few friends who have lived there and could probably have more to say about the sorts of deep divisions that Alaskan society has.  I must say, though, that in general much of the sort of division shown here is something that I can relate to as someone with a generally strong knowledge of the divisiveness of life in rural America and the wellspring of ambivalence there is about government and identity in many parts of the United States outside of the big cities.  Alaska does seem, at least in this book, to be a very small world, and small worlds have a great degree of similarity in that they bring out the pettiness and fractiousness of people to a greater extent than is evident when one looks only at human beings en masse.  If this book was definitely not my favorite by the author, it certainly provided, as always, an entertaining look at people the author happens to be spending a lot of time with.

This nearly 450 page book is divided into three parts that explore different aspects of the Alaskan experience.  In the first book, "The Encircled River," the author goes on an adventurous kayak adventure in one of Alaska's many Salmon Rivers, surrounded by the Brooks Range in northern Alaska and dealing with people as varied as forest Eskimos and government employees who want to protect large swaths of Alaskan wilderness as well as the possibility of harm from Alaska's massive grizzlies.  The second book, "What They Were Hunting For," is a rather grim and self-absorbed look at Alaskans hunting for a location for a new state capital, arguing about the dominance of Anchorage, and demonstrating a distinct lack of interest in the rest of the world outside of their large but remote state, which at times almost seems like foreign territory for all it knows or cares of the lower 48.  Finally, the third book, "Coming Into The Country," examines the divisions and rivalries among a group of people who have mostly left behind their life in the lower 48 and come to live in Alaska seeking homesteads, quarreling with the government while sometimes seeking public aid, and worried about politics and religion and questions of identity.

Indeed, as a whole this particular book demonstrates the ferocity of identity questions when one looks at Alaska.  A wide variety of people seek very different things in coming to Alaska, including space from others even while remaining dependent on logistical chains going to larger cities, political power in a small world where it does not take much to be a big fish (and this even before Sarah Palin), and a desire to create a somewhat anarchical society with little money that is funded by government largess due to the oil wealth there, as well as an unspoiled wilderness free of anyone but themselves to sort out boundaries and questions of who deserves the landfalls to be received from the exploitation of the Alaskan wilderness and its resources.  I must admit that I do not find the Alaskans to be all that different from the people I grew up around, and I was pleased to find so many interested in books despite the difficulties of collecting books in such remote territory.  If Alaska is a bit cold and remote for my tastes, the tensions of Alaskan society are only slightly more exaggerated than those of most rural areas in the American west or south, for similar reasons of colonialism.

McPhee's writing is so vivid and lively that he immediately drew me into the atmosphere that is Alaska. I don't really know how to categorize this book. It's clearly nonfiction, but it's also part story, part news report, and part personal reflection. McPhee masterfully weaves all of these disparate genres into a single, easily-followed whole. I found myself reading this book for hours on end, enjoying the incredible people and places that make up Alaska. If his goal is to make readers want to move to Alaska, he succeeded with me! Highly recommend.