Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska | 
 enlarge | Author: Seth Kantner
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 52353
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 6.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 157131301X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781571313010
ASIN: 157131301X
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Product Description
His story begins with the arrival of his father, Howard Kantner, to the remote Arctic of the 1950s and ends with him as a grown man settled in the same landscape. Through a series of moving essays and vivid photographs, ranging in subject from family histories to hunting stories, celebrations of people and places to a lament over a majestic wilderness rapidly disappearing, Shopping for Porcupine provides a compelling, intimate view of America’s last frontier — the same place that captivated so many readers of Ordinary Wolves.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
READ THIS BOOK!!! August 13, 2008
Seth Kantner's writing has a way of awakening something inside me that I don't even have words or ways to reach on my own. His storytelling prose is thoughtful, true -- it's more than words -- it's like an unnamed emotion all its own.
"Flower of the Fringe," is one of several chapters in the book that highlights characters in the writer's life...Kantner connects you with these people, beautifully captured and introduced to you in ways rarely reached in writing.
This book will not disappoint...it's creative nonfiction at its best: entertaining, intimate, eye-opening, introspective, refreshing...and true.
Life in the frigid tundra of Alaska is much unlike life anywhere else in the United States. August 10, 2008
Life in the frigid tundra of Alaska is much unlike life anywhere else in the United States. "Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska" is author and novelist Seth Kanter's memories of growing up in Alaska. Filled with essays and full color photographs regarding nature and its importance to Kanter and his Inuit roots, "Shopping for Porcupine" is a strong choice for any community library memoir collection and for anyone with a healthy interest in Alaska.
Shopping for Porcupine July 15, 2008
I loved this book! I enjoyed Ordinary Wolves, so I waited very anxiously for Mr. Kantner's next book. It was well worth the wait! The first thing I did was go through all of the pictures in the book. So THIS was the Alaska Mr, Kantner writes about! Far from the tour buses and sight seeing trains. The pictures themselves told a wonderful story! The written stories were perfect - done in a way that not only entertained me, but made me feel the Alaska Mr. Kantner describes. I felt the cold, I heard the wind and could feel the hide of a bear. I laughed, I cried, I cringed, and at times even envied experiences of a life spent in Alaska's Wilderness. The Alaska Mr. Kantner writes about is a world fast slipping away - native ways, unmarred land, plentiful animals. I am so grateful that he wrote about a lifestyle - a world - that I would never have had the chance to experience, had it not been for this book. I plan to buy more copies for gifts and would recommend this book to anyone!
Readers of Ordinary Wolves will love this one, too July 14, 2008
Ordinary Wolves is an outstanding first novel, and Shopping for Porcupine is an excellent nonfiction follow-up by Seth Kantner. If you're like me while reading Ordinary Wolves, you were wondering how much of it was fiction, and how much of it was drawn from Kantner's experiences. Shopping for Porcupine gives a great deal of insight into Kantner's personal life and upbringing. It's humorous, it's moving, it's lyrical, and I highly recommend it.
An unexpected bonus of this book is the beautiful matte photography that accompanies the text. Kantner is a talented photographer as well as a gifted writer, and his shots are sprinkled liberally throughout. In addition to these, there are many family snapshots taken by Kantner's parents and their friends.
All in all, a fascinating and well-written book that portrays parts of one man's life in Alaska without the lens of romanticism that often colors Alaskan literature.
The Real Deal July 13, 2008
Seth Kantner's book, Shopping For Porcupine, is a viscerally real collection of portraits and recollections of life on northwestern Alaska's Kobuk River, from the late 1950's through to the present day. Kantner's folks were 'outsiders' when they settled on the Kobuk, to be followed by many more. Most have moved on, but Seth - who was born in his family's sod iglu - has remained for over 40 years. His dad's connection to the land, the Inuit culture and unfettered subsistance lifestyle rubbed off on Seth, and he has carried on those traditions while coping with the inescapable intrusions of modern Western life.
I especially appreciated the honest and literally wrenching descriptions of the changes in the land, the people, the culture and the climate, that over time serve to remind us of the impermanence of anything in this world. Yet Kantner shows us that not all change is beyond our power to control or at least influence -- although simply living by example is not always enough, and speaking up can be a little like banging a pot to scare a bear away: now he knows where you are.
I have a snapshot in my mind of the upper Kobuk during the years I lived there - many of the same people and the same lifestyle that Seth describes here so accurately. Coupled with the stories and lore from before my time, that's how I see the place and that's how I wish, in a perfect world, it could remain. The changes I hear and read about are confounding and upsetting even to me, who spent a relatively short time there. The more so for Seth Kantner, whose whole life is invested in the place. Clearly the conundrum is to decide what change to accept gracefully and what to challenge, vocally and adamantly.
Wilderness living is not for everyone, and can be almost unfathomable if you haven't done it. Hudson Stuck once said, of wilderness travel by dog team, that the greatest gift one man could give another was a trail. With his writing, Seth Kanter breaks trail through the heart of the last half-century of life in northwestern Alaska as only someone who lives the life could do. Those who find it and follow will be infinitely richer for the journey.
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