Correcting the Landscape

A quiet novel with insightful observations about newspaper writing ("Journalism...by its very nature spins deceit, because...the need for coherent narrative threatens to dictate the next detail, and the next. There's so much left out.") and the conflicts publishers face ("I felt like the servant of two masters...truth and solvency"), but the story is hampered by too much intellectuallizing over actions, especially prior to a climax involving a bulldozer. Good portrait of contemporary Fairbanks, Alaska and its problems. Not a riveting read, but would make good supplemental reading for a journalism class on environmental reporting ("For every young man or woman willing to bend herself over a desk and analyze interviews with biologists, Fish & Game spokesmen, subsistence hunters, environmentalists and big game guides, willing to study wild animal populations enough to understand the terms for herself, for every seeker after truth of that caliber, there are twenty writers handing me columns that claim Alaska's wolf-control program is a 'war on wolves' or that those opposed to it are 'emotional animal-lovers from Outside.' I was coming to hate all this froth...But an informed opinion, expressed in an original, crafted and once in a while compound sentence? To me that's Chopin.")