Book: Shopping for Porcupine by Seth Kantner

This book is a Milkweed Editions book. Milkweed is an independent, nonprofit company who publishes books it feels make "a human impact on society, in the belief that good writing can transform the human heart and spirit."

Seth was born and raised and still lives in NW Alaska, north of Nome, north of the Arctic Circle. As he says, his Father "chose the tundra." This book is a paean to the land and, at times, a bittersweet swan song for the Alaska he knew as a child but which is changing because of oil, the snowmobile and climate warming. There are lovely photographs of the natural world and his family and friends in Alaska. He writes of the elders, the tundra and mountains, the rivers and ocean, the caribou, bears, moose, ducks and geese, wolves and salmon, the perils of ice-covered rivers, the cold and the dark, of berries and bugs, and of what subsistence hunting really means. He writes, "Our need for foods and furs from the land has shrunk exponentially as the Gore-Tex and plastic, Pepsi and Banquet chicken have some off the airplanes. But our ability to harvest animals grows with every Ski-Doo and Ruger rifle. In the villages now a new generation has been raised in HUD house, on basketball, satellite TV and Nintendo..."

While for most of us, Alaska is a wondrous land known only through photos, documentaries and various magazines and books, for Seth Kantner, it is his reality and his sanity. He is a true Alaskan child.