michener

Wow.

I remember as a kid looking around the mysterious bookshelves at my house, seeing few familiar titles. Imposing volumes entitles "celestial navigation", "1986 nautical almanac", and "the Hunt for Red October" stood like sentinels among the dog-eared paperback westerns that my mom devoured (and still does via audio format as she commutes back and forth to work in providence). Among these tomes i remember distinctly some gargantuan hardcover novels by one james michener - "Caribbean" and "Hawaii" to be exact. I have only maintained a faint memory of those titles until recently, when michener came up in a conversation that i had with my father. he was expounding upon michener's intense research style as he prepared to write his regional histories that, while fiction by genre, were filled with historically accurate detail. my father jokingly referred to the way that michener started each novel with the formation of the universe (practically), and proceeded from there.

well, i was intrigued - even more so after finding a plethora of michener hard covers used for $7 at the strand. so i picked up the 800+ page 'Alaska'. So far (100 pages in) i must say that i am really into it. admittedly it is a little kitschy at times, but overall i feel entertained and educated at the same time. as my father had alluded, michener did start this book about 700 million years ago, but truthfully i was really interested in gaining a cursory knowledge of the geological formation of alaska, as well as its initial settlement first by animals and subsequently by the athapascans, the eskimos and the aleuts.

at any rate... makes me want to go visit.... a trip that may not be too far off on the horizon!