Disappearance: A Map: A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudes by Sheila Nickerson
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: April 1997
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Format: Paperback, 304pp
- Series: Harvest Book Ser.
- ISBN-13: 9780156004985
- ISBN: 0156004984
Synopsis
Weaving together personal experience and wilderness lore, this poetic journey through Alaska and Alaskan history is “a potent map of love and loss and how we find our way back home through the landscape of the heart” (Terry Tempest Williams).
Annotation
Alaska looms as the main character of this lyrically beautiful memoir that weaves together the author's personal experiences, the story of humankind's futile struggle to domesticate Alaska's timeless landscape, and the record of the many people who have disappeared forever in a quest to control and conquer this vast wilderness. 304 pp. Author publicity & national ads.
Publishers Weekly
The loss of a colleague whose Cessna 340A disappeared between Yakutat and Juneau (an area known as Alaska's Bermuda Triangle) prompted the author to examine other disappearances in that vast state. A former editor of Alaska's Wildlife, poet Nickerson reaches back to early frontier Alaska, to the Russians, American missionaries, Sir John Franklin and subsequent polar expeditions, including those of Captain Bob Bartlett and Vilhjalmur Stefansson. She also meditates on another kind of loss-the disappearance of the shamans, language and culture of the natives and of the land's natural resources. Nickerson follows recent disappearances of hikers, climbers, tourists and adventurers (in 1991, the Coast Guard launched 1192 rescues, with 45 reported fatalities). These gripping stories of death and loss are deftly interwoven with reflections on the author's life in Alaska. Beautifully written, Disappearances gives us a sense of place not found in ordinary maps. Author tour. (Feb.)
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Disappearance: A Map: A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudesby Anonymous
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December 24, 2007: To know Alaska means, for most, to know the ache of loss. When Nickerson lost a friend into the unknown, she had been in Alaska long enough to expect the endless wait, the hope against hope, the hunger for certainty that never comes. She writes of this uncommonly well. The landscape of Alaska and of the human psyche she treats with a geographer's precision and poet's sensibility, exploring the deeper truths that lie beneath the spectacular.
Disappearance: A Map: A Meditation on Death and Loss in the High Latitudesby Anonymous
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November 30, 2002: I found the book to be a very well-researched novel about the whole history of disappearance in Alaska, not simply one over-publicized incident written up by a more famous author. The book probably tends to be more enjoyable to people who have lived in the area described by the book and who know what the disappearance season is like, as opposed to armchair adventurors who want an action-packed tale through which to live vicariously.
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