Bøger af Kim Heacox

"I live in the sunlight of friends and the shadows of glaciers." So begins THE ONLY KAYAK, a coming-of-middle-age memoir by Kim Heacox, who writes in the tradition of Edward Abbey, John McPhee, and Henry David Thoreau, with a voice a times tender, irate, funny, and deeply humane. What does it mean to fall in love with a place that cannot stay the same? When do you hold on and when do you let go? As Kim discovers in this provocative story, we need to be better students of change rather than instruments of change. Born in Idaho's Bitterroot Mountains and raised in Spokane, Kim moves to Alaska as a young park ranger and discovers a land and sea newly reborn from beneath a retreating glacier. "People are reborn here, too," he writes. "This place is that powerful. In Glacier Bay you don't inherit, you create. You practice resurrection because the land and sea show you that anything is possible. Moose swim across fjords. Bears traverse glaciers. Flowers emerge from granite boulders. Inlets fill with glacial silt. Shorelines shift and nautical charts become obsolete as the land - the actual crust of the Earth - rebounds after the immense weight of glacial ice (of just a few hundred years ago) has been lifted." In this tale of friendship, risk, and hope, we find a story of coming home and learning to live gracefully among the deep blue glaciers of Alaska, a place Kim calls "the Africa of America." His words offer us a chance to look into our own selves and ask how we might live with greater deliberation, purpose, and thankfulness for the wild places we still have.

Winner, National Outdoor Book Award"Part quest, part rebirth, Heacox's debut novel spins a story of Alaska's Tlingit people and the land, an old man dying, and a young man learning to live."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"A splendid, unique gem of a novel."?Library Journal (starred review)"Heacox does a superb job of transcending his characters' unique geography to create a heartwarming, all-American story."?Booklist"What makes this story so appealing is the character Old Keb. He is as finely wrought and memorable as any character in contemporary literature and energizes the tale with a humor and warmth that will keep you reading well into the night."?National Outdoor Book AwardsOld Keb Wisting is somewhere around ninety-five years old (he lost count awhile ago) and in constant pain and thinks he wants to die. He also thinks he thinks too much. Part Norwegian and part Tlingit Native ("with some Filipino and Portuguese thrown in"), he's the last living canoe carver in the village of Jinkaat, in Southeast Alaska.When his grandson, James, a promising basketball player, ruins his leg in a logging accident and tells his grandpa that he has nothing left to live for, Old Keb comes alive and finishes his last canoe, with help from his grandson. Together (with a few friends and a crazy but likeable dog named Steve) they embark on a great canoe journey. Suddenly all of Old Keb's senses come into play, so clever and wise in how he reads the currents, tides, and storms. Nobody can find him. He and the others paddle deep into wild Alaska, but mostly into the human heart, in a story of adventure, love, and reconciliation. With its rogue's gallery of colorful, endearing, small-town characters, this book stands as a wonderful blend of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and John Nichols's The Milagro Beanfield War, with dashes of John Steinbeck thrown in.

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A compelling memoir about Kim Heacox's more than thirty-year relationship with the most iconic landscape in Alaska