Rowing to Alaska: And Other True Stories |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Alaska History > Item 330
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Rowing to Alaska: And Other True Stories
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by Wayne McLennan
Sales Rank: 1318389
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List Price: $15.95
$15.95
At Amazon
on 9-15-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 239 pages
Published by: Granta UK July 1, 2005
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1862077878
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1862077874
Book Dimensions:
7.6 x 5 x 0.8 inches
Weighs: 3.5 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Bank clerk, construction worker, gold miner, dishwasher, tree planter and deckhand, McLennan has found his true calling as a storyteller in his first collection of personal essays detailing his adventures around the globe. Beginning with his younger days in his native Australia, McLennan keeps the testosterone coming as he rides broncos, boxes, plays rugby and "pig chases" (a discreet term for hunting wild boar) while clerking in a bank and keeping company with a bar stool each night. Needing some distance from his homeland, he travels to Europe, then takes a tree-planting job in Washington State, where, inspired by the miners of the gold rush, he and a buddy build a boat in which they row to Alaska. After this six-month escapade and a stint on a fishing boat, McLennan heads to South America to mine gold and soon after discovers something just as important: "I would never stay doing one job all my life, and that I was going to live away from my home town, far away." While the transitions between essays are somewhat uneven, McLennan adroitly captures the fleeting details of travel, making this collection a charming success. (Dec. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
The Times
"A swashbuckling collection of stories based on McLennan's extraordinarily itinerant life great yarns, great fun."
Reader Reviews
During those inbetween times when I am unable to travel myself (woe is me), then I travel on a vehicle of words - and oh, how satisfactory is this one! McLennan is new to writing, or so he claims at the opening of this book, but I struggle to believe it. He tells of moving to Estonia with his Dutch wife (she surely has courage to marry such a wanderlusting man), a writer, and when he struggles with boredom, she encourages him to put his snappy stories to the written page - and this is the result. If he's not practiced, he certainly is gifted. A comparison made by a Granta reviewer (under the publisher's umbrella, but I'm not arguing) to Hemingway is not unwarranted. McLennan's travel stories are filled to bursting with male bravado, much like Papa's, and he knows how to write spare when needed, spiced when it serves, lavish when the story requires it. "Rowing" is nearly impossible to put down, if only to eye the road oneself. McLennan comes from Australia, but calls the world, the road, his home. The title story is probably my personal favorite, if only because good-sized chunks of my own wanderlusting heart still reside in Alaska, haunted by my own memories which he so well brought to life again. It is a tale of two men rowing 1,000 miles from Seattle to Alaska, and if the author wasn't sworn to lifelong adventure seeking before then, he was by the time he completed this journey. McLennan writes (in no particular order, in 15 travel essays) about a long list of improbable jobs (bank clerk, gold panner, boat skipper, bartender, wild pig hunter) and places he has experienced by full immersion: Australia, Costa Rica, Pacific Northwest, Nicarauga, London, France, Spain, Estonia. His rich language brings to life great adventure without arrogance (well, maybe a little, in his belt notching adventures with the opposite gender), not sparing himself or anyone else in his path an honest and colorful appraisal. He takes on dangerous expeditions as if it never occurred to him not to do so, not a question or hesitancy in his mind, and travel becomes his rites of passage into finding purpose outside the routine everyday too many rest of us accept. "Rowing to Alaska" itches beneath the skin and hammers in the heart for anyone who wants something more out of life - in either the living of it or even just the reading about it.
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Rowing to Alaska: And Other True Stories
Available from Amazon
Price: $15.95
Updated on 9-15-2008.
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