The Wake of the Unseen Object: Travels through Alaska's Native Landscapes

by Tom Kizzia

Overview

A  journey to Alaska’s remote roadless villages, during a time of great historical transition, brings us this enduring portrait of a place and its people. Alutiiq, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Athabascan subjects reveal themselves as entirely contemporary individuals with deep longings and connection to the land and to their past. Tom Kizzia’s account of his travels off the Alaska road system, first published in 1991, has endured with a sterling reputation for its thoughtful, poetic, unflinching engagement with the complexity of Alaska’s rural communities. Wake of the Unseen Object is now considered some of the finest nonfiction writing about Alaska. This new edition includes an updated introduction by the author, looking at what remains the same after thirty years and what is different—both in Alaska, and in the expectations placed on a reporter visiting from another world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781602234314
Publisher:	University of Alaska Press
Publication date:	12/15/2020
Series:	Classic Reprint Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	620 KB

About the Author

Tom Kizzia is the author of the New York Times bestseller Pilgrim’s Wilderness. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017. He traveled widely in rural Alaska as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News.
 

Table of Contents

Contents Introduction to the new edition 1. Forest Primeval 2. Spirit World 3. People of Kauwerak 4. Return of the Native 5. Indian Country 6. Animal Powers 7. Red Devil 8. Icons 9. River People 10. Yupiit Nation 11. The Wake of the Unseen Object Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

This is a deliciously friendly, intimate, savvy, unpretentious book by an Alaskan who knows his territory as writers from “Outside” who fly in and out for a quick tour do not. Its facts, its tales, its personality make it a delight. - Edward Hoagland


Kizzia writes with a quiet compassion that brings the people and their hard land
clearly into focus. - Boston Globe


A charming, informative book . . . Kizzia writes a clear, unobtrusive prose that
crystallizes in memorable images. - The Washington Post


Kizzia, whose writing has an elegant ease, has fashioned a spell-binding book in
which he has captured much of the endearing, the funny, the revealing, the wise. -
Daily Sitka Sentinel


Kizzia is a thoughtful and lyrical writer who manages to be sensitive without veering into sentimentality. - Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Publisher

A forgotten classic—not only one of the top books about Alaska Native culture, but one of the best Alaska books ever…Every bit as fresh and relevant today as it was a quarter century ago.

Nick Jans

"A boatful of native Alaskans slapping downriver through the chop on their way to the biggest softball game of the season. A hunter singing the old songs for hunting luck, as he snowmobiles onto the ice with his rifle. Such contrasts—Eskimo and outsider, ancient and modern—run through Tom Kizzia's chronicle of travels in the Alaska bush in search of 'ancestral landscapes.'"—Smithsonian

Smithsonian

"In the course of a two-year odyssey . . . Kizzia visited numerous native settlements, interviewed leaders and followers, and wrote the feature articles that make up this charming, informative book. . . . Kizzia writes a clear, unobtrusive prose that crystallizes in memorable images."—Washington Post

Washington Post

"Kizzia writes with a quiet compassion that brings the people and their hard land clearly into focus."—Boston Globe

Boston Globe

"Kizzia . . . is a thoughtful and lyrical writer who manages to be sensitive without veering into sentimentality. . . . [He] joined Eskimos and Athabaskan Indians in steambaths and softball games. He visited their homes and their Russian Orthodox churches and their fishing camps. He even went on a ruthless whale hunt with two young Eskimos, a skiff and a .22-caliber rifle. A careful and sympathetic observer."—Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia Inquirer

"In the course of a two-year odyssey . . . Kizzia visited numerous native settlements, interviewed leaders and followers, and wrote the feature articles that make up this charming, informative book. . . . Kizzia writes a clear, unobtrusive prose that crystallizes in memorable images."—Washington Post

Washington Post