James Campbell reports the life of Heimo Korth and the family he has raised, the last family of trappers to remain in the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Although this book has one foot in the "wilderness adventure can you believe anyone can survive this" genre (Heimo regularly traps in -50 weather and even jogs in -20 weather), it is also a kind of domestic family saga, almost a "Little House on the Prairie" but the prairie is the Arctic.

Heimo, his wife Edna, and daughters Rhonda and Krin, face near tragedies and real tragedies lost in blizzards, or facing a broken-down snow machine miles from home, or jumping from ice flow to ice flow in desparate hope of making it back to shore, or falling through overflow ice on the river. Remarkably though, the main thing I'll remember about this book is the sense it conveys of Heimo's redemption (lost and alcoholic, he came to Alaska to trap in the 70s, but dried up and built a family there), and of the love and affection of a family who have no one but each other for months on end. This is a real testament to Campbell's skill as a journalist and author.

The adventure and drama of the Arctic keep the reader turning pages like a good mystery but the after-effect is one of love and integrity.

Many of the best-known books about Alaska, its people and wilderness, have been written from an outsider's perspective (John McPhee, for example, or Joe McGinniss), with an outsider's sense of detachment and strangeness, as though what they were commenting on were just slightly odd on some level.

Margaret Murie (known as "Mardy"), gives as Alaska from a true insider's perspective, as one who grew up with it, knows it in her bones, and loves it the way we love our closest family.

Born in 1902, Mardy moved to Fairbanks at age 9, where kids went to school in -50F temperatures and where the only way in or out of Alaska in winter was on the back of a mail sled propelled by sled dogs. One of the first grads of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, she married the naturalist Olaus Murie and honeymooned in the Arctic. Over the years, fearless Mardy even took her infant children on expeditions into the wild.

The book is an indivisible combination of autobiography and nature writing. Murie has a remarkable eye; her descriptive powers rival McPhee's but her tone is more one of powerful affection rather than awe. My favorite story was of a young teenage Mardy, on her way to the Lower 48 to go to high school, catching the last mail sled out of town in the spring of 1918. This spring trip took many days; at each river crossing there was a possibility of not making it over the thinning ice.

What an adventure! Combined with that adventure is a powerful romance, the lifelong relationship between Olaus, a professional naturalist; Mardy, the fearless and intrepid companion; and Alaska herself.

Mardy Murie died only last year, at age 101. If you read this book, you will regret having just missed her; she deserves to be missed.

Finding some real theology in a bawdy sarcastic laff-riot parody of a gospel is like finding either real butter or a dead frog in your movie popcorn, depending on your own religious perspective. It is a wonderful addition for some, a cause for disgust in others, and a complete surprise to everybody.

Christopher Moore's story claims to be a new Gospel written by one Levi, known as "Biff," who was Jesus' best friend from childhood. A blond, air-headed angel (somehow I see Owen Wilson in the movie) has resurrected him and ensconced him in the Hyatt-Regency Saint Louis to write a new Gospel (while the Angel becomes addicted to soap operas). Biff writes a wacky, profane story about how Jesus, accompanied by Biff, grew from a kind of pipsqueak six-year-old to become truly the Messiah-with special emphasis on the years between childhood and the beginning of his ministry, during which Moore asserts that Jesus and Biff sought out the three Magi. On the road (like a Biblical Bob Hope and Bing Crosby), they spend years in a magical Confucian stronghold carved into a mountain (populated by lusty whipsmart concubines with martial arts skills straight out of a Tarentino movie), as well as in a Tibet-like Buddhist monastery (where Biff learns to move like lightning and Jesus becomes a bodhisattva), and finally visiting India. In the process Jesus becomes the Messiah and Biff....well, Biff becomes the inventor of sarcasm.

Now, as to the butter-vs-frogs analogy: I'm a religious liberal, and to me Moore's book is real farce. It's the funniest book I've ever read, and parts of it are so funny they will have many people actually gasping for air from laughter (and Jesus' attempt to dictate the Beatitudes to Biff is the single funniest passage of the funniest book). So for me this book is real butter on my popcorn.

Moreover, because Moore is grappling with a genuine theological puzzle - how Jesus could be fully man and fully god at the same time - even believing Christians who can read the book at armslength will find something interesting. Theologically, the "fully man" part has always been hard to appreciate, since part of what makes us human (lust, say, or incomprehension, or even, I'm amazed to say, flatulence) seems to be entirely outside Jesus' historical existence. Moore's take on Jesus was that he had to learn (as all true humans must do) how to grow into his calling, yet the premise of the book is, indisputably, that Jesus WAS the Messiah. So behind the laughter Moore is, in his way, trying to suggest one possible solution to this very old theological problem.

But to a final group - those who are offended by a humorous approach to their faith - you folks will just hate this. Honest, you'll be deeply offended. If you see someone reading "Lamb," and rolling on the floor, just stay clear. For you this is popcorn with a dead frog in it.

Everybody else, please read this!

Ed Cray's biography of Woody Guthrie gives us as complete a picture of the folk-song legend as we are ever likely to get; he had the cooperation of all surviving members of the Guthrie family and full access to Guthrie's personal papers. Cray also does a marvelous job giving us a sense of Guthrie's work, liberally sprinkling his text with lyrics from familiar and unfamiliar songs. The result is not only complete and comprehensive but very sympathetic, despite details (wandering, neglecting his children, womanizing, drinking, fighting, etc.) that bring Guthrie down a peg from the sainthood that some might want to give him.

Guthrie himself seems a knotty reflection of the troubled times in which his music first arose: the struggles of the working poor during the Great Depression, followed by the paranoia of McCarthyism in the late 40s and beyond. Both Guthrie and his music showed a kind of restless, kinetic energy until this second period set in, but then dissolve in a kind of undisciplined confusion.

We know now of course that this change in Guthrie was caused by his disease, Huntington's chorea, which hospitalized him for the last decade or more of his life. Cray does an exceptionally good job of showing the gradual increase of the disease from the point where its earlier symptoms just seemed like a quirky part of Guthrie's personality to the point where his internal fight against it made him violent, and finally to the point where he was rendered speechless and immobile. Guthrie's second wife Marjorie (Arlo's mother) comes off fairly saintly, visiting Guthrie with their kids weekly in the hospital for years even after their divorce.

In sum, the book is inspirational, informative, and poignant as well. The only thing that keeps me from giving it five stars is its length, which fans of Guthrie will not find daunting but which may be more than you are looking for it you are only a casual reader.

The "top note" of Joe McGinniss' story "Going to Extremes" is about what happens when a lot of folks from the lower 48 and a lot of money are thrown into Alaska at the same time--the late 1970s, when the pipeline was being built. McGinniss casts an urban reporter's jaundiced eye, for example, toward the drinking and drugs that seem like an inevitable consequence of people in the cold wilderness with nothing to do and some money.

Sometimes he intends to be virtually comic, as when a newbie pipefitter offloads his pickup truck from the ferry in a Panhandle town unconnected to the rest of the world by road, or when a drug-addled prostitute runs in to a travel agency in Valdez, Alaska, pointing a gun at the travel agent demanding an immediate trip out of town (to get away from creditors). The agent settles her down and puts her in his truck--as though this sort of thing happened everyday-- while he finishes out his conversation with McGinniss inside.

A long essay documenting McGinniss' trip to the far northern Brooks Range is dominated by his fear of bears (that's logical, I guess) and his city-slicker mountaineering inabilities, although it eventually rises to suggest the majesty of the land he was touring.

In contrast to John McPhee's "Coming into the Country," written in the same era, McGinniss seems determined to remain a sardonic outsider, an observer of people and their weaknesses primarily, rather than an observer of nature. It's an insightful approach although I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of real Alaskans objected to it, and certainly I am hoping to avoid the gun-toting ladies of the evening on my upcoming trip to tour the state.

Warm-hearted book with a devastating ending

"Crossing to Safety" is Stegner's swan song, his last novel. It does have a bittersweet, nostalgic feel to it, written from the perspective of an old writer/professor, much like Stegner, near the end of his life and looking back on what came before. The plot of the book involves the enduring friendship of two young couples, wed in the 1930s. Sid is a likeable fellow who struggles to gain academic acceptance and tenure, married to Charity, a well-to-do extrovert who micromanages his career. Larry, the narrator, is a naturally gifted novelist, married to the sweet-tempered Sally.

The novel follows their lives through small wins (the acceptance of a novel) and near tragedies. This part moves in a smooth, elegiac way-you get the sense of Stegner's genuine affection for these characters-but I did not find the characters exceptional in any way. I confess, for example, to getting a small bee in my bonnet about the complete absence of the couples' children from most of the narrative. Sid and Charity's five kids and Larry and Sally's daughter are generally off-stage, under the care of a nanny.

But then a kind of tidal wave hits, with all the skill Stegner can muster. The impending death of one of the characters brings out the conflicts inherent in even the most enduring of marriages; I know of no place in literature where the joys and sorrows of a marriage are portrayed with such precision and intensity. The way kindness and inadvertent cruelty seem all knotted up together; the way you can't live life apart; the way the intense abiding love of one person also makes you terribly vulnerable. These Stegner gets exactly, truly right.

Read through to this remarkable end; it will be worthwhile.

Caroline Alexander takes a story you perhaps thought you knew-the 1789 mutiny on board the HMS Bounty-and says something new about it, in a style that is both economical, elegant, and exciting. In a first chapter that is a masterpiece of simple story-telling, she structures the fantastic story: "Captain" William Bligh (in fact, he was only a lieutenant) commanded the HMS Bounty to Tahiti, suffered the mutiny of part of his crew, and navigated a simple row-boat across many thousands of miles of the Pacific to be rescued. A second voyage, undertaken by the HMS Pandora, discovered many mutineers on a distant island, taking them into custody, only to be broken up in a terrible storm, its survivors (crew and prisoners) enduring a second open-boat voyage to safety. On return to England a length court-martial condemned many of the mutineers to death, but left unscathed young Peter Heywood, convicted but later pardoned.

The traditional view of things (i.e. the one you 'know' from the movie versions) has Bligh as a torturer, the famous Fletcher Christian as a defender of the ordinary sailor's rights, and Heywood as an innocent bystander. Through careful reading of seemingly every contemporary document-including every bit of the trial transcripts-Alexander subverts the story to one of privilege rebelling against authority: whereas Bligh came from a family of extremely modest means, Christian and Heywood both came from old and well-connected families who, after the courtmartial, ensured their own good names by besmirching Bligh's.

This is not sensational journalism but careful scholarship, and even if you don't agree with Alexander's 'take' on the subject, you will enjoy hearing the sailor's own first-person narratives, as well as Alexander's careful reconstruction of what actually occurred.

This book was nominated for the National Book Critic's Circle award for non-fiction; it was richly deserved. "HMS Bounty" receives my highest endorsement as well!

By some instinct, I turned on my tiny black-and-white TV during the 1980 Olympics and, completely by accident, caught the last 15 minutes of the U.S.-Russia hockey game--the one most prominently featured in the movie "Miracle." Watching the movie brought back the rush, the physical THRILL of watching that last, winning puck shoot into the net. I was in my last year of college in Boston (where Eruzioni was a local hero), and thus the same age as many of the hockey players depicted in the film.

My kids, still young, didn't need the memories to find this movie appealing; for them, it was a great addition to the "sports underdog" genre of movies. (Although I have to admit they did not at first believe that people ever wore their hair like that; I had to show them my high-school yearbook to convince them).

An admirable sports film and a good choice for families.

Lynne Truss is a very funny woman who has an "inner stickler" aching to ride around, vigilante-like, with a bucket of white paint eliminating punctuation errors (such as the one in the title above) from public life. But instead she has written a simple, short book on the unlikely topic of punctuation. If you are the sort of person who cringes when someone writes a phrase like "the penguin has it's detractors," you will occasionally find yourself pumping your fist in the air exclaiming "Yes! Yes!" in agreement with Truss's no-nonsense, no-excuses, laff-riot approach.

If you have little interest in punctuation-or even if you are frightened and suspicious of it-Truss is still worth a go. Her objective is to convince you that punctuation is a thoughtful friend rather than a dictator. For example, consider these alternative phrases and their varying interpretations, from Handel's Messiah:

"Comfort ye my people" (please go out and comfort my people) versus
"Comfort ye, my people" (just cheer up, you lot; it might never happen)

Pretty different, eh? Without the comma, poor Handel risked being misunderstood.

Truss is humorous rather than unforgiving; she even permits Americans their habit (strange to the British) of putting closing quotes after all other punctuation, and their preference for the "Oxford comma."

And if you want to know what an "Oxford comma" is, read the book and be wittily enlightened.

Not the other way around. This was the greatest theme I took away from Adam Nicolson's "Sea Room," the story of the three tiny, uninhabited Shiant (say "Shant") Islands in the Hebrides of Scotland, which Nicholson inherited from his father (the famed author Nigel Nicolson, the son of Vita Sackville-West).

Nicolson's approach to describing the islands for his readers resembles John McPhee's: it's an engaging blend of natural history (how were the islands formed?), human history (who lived here and why?), archaeology, and ecology (how do the animals and plants of the Shiants form a whole world?). The difference is that Nicolson's passion for place is quite specific: he loves the Shiants like one loves one's parents, infinitely and irreplaceably. You can't imagine him running off and writing a second book about another place.

Nicolson's prose is lyric and detailed at the same time; despite the length (350 pages and more), the story never flags. At the end of the book, Nicholson defends his continued private ownership of the islands (many feel they should be a public trust); I wasn't convinced, but I respected his strong urge to transmit his love of the place to his son and future generations of his family.

By the way, Nicholson publicly offers the keys to his cottage to anyone desiring to stay there (his e-mail address is in the book); but consider first that rats seem now to be part of the natural ecology of the place. But perhaps that won't phase you (it doesn't phase Nicholson a bit!).