“A Land Gone Lonesome”: More Tales of the Yukon River
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.14.06 | 11:30 AM ET
Did Laurie Gough’s World Hum dispatch Yukon Summer Sky only whet your appetite for stories of the Yukon River? Dan O’Neill’s book A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage Along the Yukon River came out recently, and yesterday the New York Times called it “a colorful and meandering portrait of the region, with an intriguing agenda.” That agenda? Reviewer Louise Jarvis Flynn writes: “Writers are human conservationists perforce, and O’Neill is a fierce protector. ‘As people are eliminated from Alaska’s parks, new stories cease to be created and the tradition dies,’ he writes. O’Neill casts a mold of the Yukon landscape before nature takes back the last human footprint. He reintroduces us to our more resourceful selves, and reminds us that some people — nutty as they may seem — actually want to live those bumper sticker slogans on beat-up Volvos. To O’Neill, it’s only fair to leave the scrappy individualists to their hidey-huts and fish wheels, their trapping lines and birch canoes, not only for their sake but for ours: to leave a little something for the American imagination, an elemental way of life that is lonely and lovely and very nearly gone.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
