Tide, Feather, Snow
A Life in Alaska
By Miranda Weiss
(Harper, Hardcover, 9780061710254, 288pp.)
Publication Date: May 2009
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback
Categories: Personal Memoirs, Regional Subjects - General
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Selected by Indie Booksellers for the May 2009 Indie NotablesAlaska is a place where know-how is currency and a novice's mistakes can kill you. An extreme landscape in both its beauty and challenges, the state is nicknamed "The Last Frontier" with good reason: Here is a paradoxical landscape where boundaries—between community and isolation, bounty and deprivation, conservation and exploitation—are constantly in flux.
But the state has also always been a place for reinvention, a refuge as much for those desperate to escape something as for those on a quest for something else. In Tide, Feather, Snow, Miranda Weiss, a young woman who grew up landlocked in well-kept East Coast suburbs, moves with her boyfriend to Homer, Alaska, where the days are quartered by the most extreme tides in the country, where the years are marked by seasons of fish, and where locals carry around the knowledge of fish, tides, boats, and weather as ballast. At first, she struggles to make a place for herself in this unfamiliar country. But ultimately, Weiss learns the skills to survive on her own, from setting a fishing net to befriending the locals, from jarring rosehip butter to skinning a sea otter.
Weiss's keenly observed prose introduces readers to the memorable people and peculiar beauty of Alaska's vast landscape and takes us on her personal journey of adventure, physical challenge, and culture clash. In the tradition of John McPhee's Coming into the Country, this elegant and affecting memoir is nature writing at its best.
Miranda Weiss received her MFA from Columbia University. Raised in Maryland, she now lives in Homer, Alaska.
“Tide, Feather, Snow is about the resplendence and subtleties of coastal Alaska, and about one woman’s attempt to be fully present in them. Weiss serves as a skilled and poetic witness to a place undergoing incessant change.”
-Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector
“Tide, Feather, Snow is a lovely, feathery book indeed—a labor of love and a pleasure to read.”
-Edward Hoagland, author of Notes from the Century Before
“Humbly sends its roots down into the soil of the Kenai Peninsula. . . . [Weiss] deftly spins her quiet narratives out of the smallest details and anecdotes, and spices them with the richness of texture seldom seen in non-fiction.”
-Krestia DeGeorge, Anchorage Press
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