Twenty-five years ago Philip L. Fradkin read a book about a remote bay on the Gulf of Alaska coast. The noted environmental historian was attracted by the threads of violence woven through the natural and human histories of Lituya Bay. Could these histories be related, and if so, how? The attempt to define the power of this wild place was a tantalizing and, as it turned out, dangerous quest. This compelling and eerie memoir tells of Fradkin's odyssey...
On About.com, I said the following about this book: This dark, impressionistic exploration of landscape and culture in America's most dangerous place is the heart of Fradkin's "earthquake trilogy." In Lituya Bay, nature is stark and the human presence always precarious. In this book is no comforting gloss of scientific detachment. Even the book's geologists feel the chill along the spine, and the ghosts of the bay, witnesses...
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A fine little book about Lituya Bay, a stunningly beautiful nook of sea, ice, rock and rainforest just north of Glacier Bay Alaska on the pacific coast in southeast Alaska. The bay is south of Yakutat and Dry Bays and is a remote part of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. The Bay has quite a story to tell and Fradkin does a good job of laying out the human/nature interactions that have gone on in this place. Fradkin breaks...
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