Alaska (novel)
1st edition cover
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| Author | James A. Michener |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical |
| Publisher | Random House |
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Publication date
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1988 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 868 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 17441704 |
| 813/.54 19 | |
| LC Class | PS3525.I19 A79 1988 |
Alaska is a historical novel by James A. Michener, published in 1988. Like other Michener titles, Alaska spans a considerable amount of time.
Published in 1988 by Random House, Alaska is 868 pages long. Along with the reading, Michener provides a table of contents, a list of acknowledgements, and a Fact and Fiction section. The third item offers the reader an insight into what occurred in real life and what the author invented.
A sweeping description of the formation of the North American continent. The reader follows the development of the Alaskan terrain over millennia.
The city of Los Angeles is now some twenty-four hundred miles south of central Alaska, and since it is moving slowly northward as the San Andreas fault slides irresistibly along, the city is destined eventually to become part of Alaska. If the movement is two inches a year, which it often is, we can expect Los Angeles to arrive off Anchorage in about seventy-six million years.
The plot of this chapter follows the mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths as they make their way into Alaska via the land bridge. First, the animals are discussed in general terms. Then, in the second half of the chapter, the reader learns about a specific mammoth named Mastodon, and another named Matriarch. The plot follows Matriarch and her family, as they encounter man for the first time.
The reader meets some of the early Eskimos, particularly a man named Oogruk and his family. The chapter details the hunting of a whale as well as the beginning of hunting sea otters for fur by the Russians.
This chapter tells of the early exploration of Alaska along with Russia's first encounters with the native peoples, including the brutal slaughter of many native people and sea otters.
The duel referred to in the chapter's title is the one between the shamanism of the native people and the Christianity of the Russian settlers. After the men from one tribe are taken away to aid in hunting, the women and babies are left to fend for themselves. They learn to pilot kayaks, something that had been forbidden to them, and ultimately harpoon a small whale to ensure their survival. After the Russians return, a girl named Cidaq is "purchased" and taken to Kodiak Island, but not before she is brutally abused by one sailor in particular. On Kodiak, she consults with a shaman and his mummy and decides to seek revenge upon this man by converting to Christianity to marry him when he returns to Kodiak, believing that she can humiliate him by refusing to marry him at the last moment. However, she goes through with the wedding and becomes a battered wife. A priest on Kodiak falls in love with her, and after her husband is killed by a great tidal wave, Cidaq (rechristened Sofia) marries the priest, who changes his relationship with the church to become the kind of priest who can marry. At the end of the chapter, Michener states that Christianity won over shamanism, but in the process, the population of native people dwindled from more than 18,000 to fewer than 1,200.
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