Hoagland is now 80 years old and in his book Alaskan Travels: Far-Flung Tales of Love and Adventure, he revisits his files and his memory. He recounts the stories collected and combines them with a longer thread about his affair with Linda,douuo.com/gucci, whose full name he never reveals. His succinct style flows readily and his descriptions are never too elaborate. The affair with Linda gives the reader reason to keep turning pages beyond the more ordinary pleasure of visiting real places through another person’s descriptions. (For Alaska readers, particularly in certain Anchorage circles, there’s also some gossip fodder.)
Perhaps no one, and certainly not an alert reporter from New York, could have boarded a Seattle-to-Anchorage flight in the early 1980s without taking note of the culture shifting around them. Roughnecks were as likely to occupy first-class seats as businessmen. Hard drinkers would be interspersed with families in coach. Enlisted men and other hopeful newcomers could be seen gazing out the window at endless wilderness, wondering what they had gotten themselves into. And Alaska can dish it out, Hoagland notes. He describes one return flight during which a woman cried all the way to Seattle.
As a reporter, Hoagland is unflinching as he describes Alaska during a time of big changes. It was a time when, either because, or in spite of,Burberry On Sale, the North Slope oil boom, the rush to “civilize” the place had quickened. Yet it was still a time when Alaskans seemed more liberated, more prone to risks or ambitious gambles and a whole lot rougher around the edges. They were also likely, as much as Alaskans before or after, to have their hopes dashed in an unforgiving place. Hoagland captures that in sketches of urban business people, rural cabin-dwellers and in the descriptions of a handful of rural places.
Some of Alaskan Travels can be uncomfortable for Alaskans to read. During that time, visits to strip joints were a de-rigueur part of Anchorage civic life, at least among businessmen with out-of-town guests. In the bush, mushers spoke freely about culling digs. Hoagland even meets a white musher who admits to feeding dog meat to dogs during a year when salmon ran short and nearby villagers had too many animals,Prada Outlet. As for Alaska’s politics in the 1980s, “The corruption was so blatant it amounted to a form of innocence,beats by dre,” he writes. ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
Hoagland scored an assignment with Vanity Fair to write profiles of some of the newly rich boomers,Gucci Outlet. They’re briefed here and provide some of the best stuff in the book: a description of Anchorage during the boom, when many people saw Alaska’s economic star on the rise and assumed it would be rising forever,Louis Vuitton Online. Bob Uchitel, who made a small fortune building a cable TV system in Anchorage, told Hoagland, “You don’t make money running a business, but in buying and selling businesses,” and also said a person can only make it in Alaska if they love Alaska. Uchitel’s rags-to-riches story ended with a cocaine overdose in a lonely upscale home on the Hillside. That fall from grace was not lost on Hoagland, who revisits newspaper descriptions of Uchitel’s drug-ravaged body.
The author confesses that Pete Zamarello, then called the strip mall king, became a personal favorite among the boomers who granted interviews. Zamarello told Hoagland about his difficulties getting projects financed locally, and how he traveled to London and Beirut to seek out investors to build in Anchorage. Real estate developer Connie Yoshimura is portrayed as a kinder, gentler player on the business scene. While Zamarello boasts he can bury a politician in an upcoming election, Yoshimua talks about respecting the humanity of colleagues and customers.
Yoshimura, clearly also one of Hoagland’s favorites, was one of Alaska’s most accomplished professionals in real estate in the early ‘80s. At first she worked face-to-face, one home at a time, and succeeded as Anchorage’s population swelled. She wanted more, and earned it, by adapting to the male-dominated arena in which subdivisions, shopping centers and neighborhoods were financed and developed. Her philosophy remained consistent, by Hoagland’s account. Salesmanship required expertise and compassion for the person across the table. “You provide knowledge to a customer,” she told Hoagland. (Yoshimura is still in Anchorage, and recently has served on the city planning and zoning commission.)
Hoagland’s descriptions of rural life include accounts of rampant alcoholism, broken men (both Native and newcomer) and of stronger characters, both women and men, who struggled to keep villages from being overrun by modern afflictions. There are solitary bush rats who gain a foothold with little more than a rifle and their wits and others who seem to surprise the author by actually surviving despite their personality defects.
While Linda and the local nurses battle tuberculosis, Hoagland interviews trappers,celine bag, pilots and Alaska Native elders. He covers a running of the Kuskokwim 300 from Bethel, where the race is featured on the radio in Yup’ik and English. Only one Native musher,Tory Burch shoes, the famed George Atla, ran the race that year and finished in second place, losing by only 15 seconds, according to Hoagland’s report. A white attorney beat Atla, according to Hoagland, partly by intimidating the more experienced musher’s team with whip.
The author folds racial tensions of the day into his description of the race. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement was “perceived as a giant Washington giveaway” by many local whites, he reports, and the white musher’s victory was worth celebrating simply because of the defeat of a famous Alaska Native. It’s a cynical view, and it doesn’t stand alone in this book, but there is a fair amount of hope in these pages, too.
There are a few things Alaska readers will wonder about while reading Alaska Travels. The first is Linda. You will want to know more, and if there are any more like her. Next readers might question the picture of Alaskans drawn from the long memory of a writer from New York. Hoagland’s prose is top notch, for sure, but is his memory clear? Did he meet a cross-section of Alaskans, or only those most eager to grant a magazine interview?
More importantly, were Alaskans really like that in the ‘80s? If so, how much different can we be today? I can’t say what value a traveler from Outside might find in this book. I can’t say if a person planning to arrive in Alaska soon should purchase it as a cultural guide. I can say that some questions about Alaskans—who are we and what weaknesses and strengths do we have?—are worth pondering and make Hoagland’s book worth reading.

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