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Zusatztext “This book is as remarkable as the landscape it describes.” — Newsweek “One of the most interesting! revealing! and delightful travel books I have read.”— The New York Review of Books “His journal is about tangles and unrealized ambitions . . . and he understands wonderfully what to make of what he sees and hears. . . . A strange and beautiful book.”— The Washington Post “Hoagland builds up an extensive! vivid picture of a place and people and! like all good travel writers! makes the reader want to start right out over his tracks.”— The Atlantic Monthly “A beautiful book: so sharp and persistent in rendering the visible world! and yet so strangely wild with feeling.”—Philip Roth “A spellbinding document.”—George Plimpton Informationen zum Autor Edward Hoagland is the author of nearly twenty books, several of which have been nominated for the National Book Award, the American Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hoagland lives in Bennington, Vermont. Jon Krakauer is the author of Into Thin Air , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Into the Wild . His work has appeared in many magazines, including Outside , Smithsonian , and National Geographic . He chose the books in this series for their literary merit and historical significance—and because he found them such a pleasure to read. Klappentext In 1966, Edward Hoagland made a three-month excursion into the wild country of British Columbia and encountered a way of life that was disappearing even as he chronicled it. Showcasing Hoagland's extraordinary gifts for portraiture—his cast runs from salty prospector to trader, explorer, missionary, and indigenous guide—Notes from the Century Before is a breathtaking mix of anecdote, derring-do, and unparalleled elegy from one of the finest writers of our time. From the Introduction by David Quammen The century before is now the century before that, and Edward Hoagland’s first nonfiction book is more lively and valuable than ever, thirty-three years after its first publication. Why? When you’ve read it you’ll know, in four or five different dimensions, but for the meantime here’s a provisional, simplistic answer: because it’s filled with human character, lost stories found, the cruel but mesmerizing spectacle of time, and one extraordinarily musical voice, the author’s. Notes from the Century Before is also cram-packed with landscape but, for all the gloriousness of northwestern British Columbia (at least as it was in 1966, not to mention earlier), landscape is not quite the point. Although Hoagland is happy to call himself “a rhapsodist,” this is something other than a wide-angle rhapsody on mountains and rivers and muskeg and alder thickets and bears. The landscape that Hoagland explores, around the headwaters of the Stikine and Skeena rivers and along the Telegraph Trail, an obscure paisley-patterned region of short, curling valleys and moderate peaks just south of the Yukon and west of the Rockies, is seen mainly as a template to which people have shaped themselves, like limpets and barnacles plastered upon surf-scoured rocks, riding out the bashing high tides and the desiccating lows. The scenery is great but the real rhapsodizing-conveyed indirectly, through descriptive attention-is on the wonderful variousness of human enterprise, perversity, and grit. “There was a murderer named Shorty on the river, who used to shoot people from ambush, or entice them into his boat and tip them overboard in the rapids,” Hoagland reports, apropos of nothing except his own zestful curiosity about the who, what, where, when, and how of his chosen place. Shorty later did time for stealing airplane fuel with a siphon. “He came out of jail a chastened man, a respectable citizen, trained...
