Edward Hoagland - Böcker

Intends to put a conservationist's passion for nature in relief. This title celebrates the Sierra Nevada, which the author dedicated his life to saving, and recounts his visits to Yosemite Valley, Kings Canyon, Sequoia Groves, and Mount Whiskey.

Thirty years ago, celebrated American writer Edward Hoagland, in his early fifties and already with a dozen acclaimed books under his belt, had a choice: a midlife crisis or a midlife adventure. He chose the adventure. Pencil and notebook at the ready, Hoagland set out to explore and write about one of the last truly wild territories remaining on the face of the earth: Alaska. From the Arctic Ocean to the Kenai Peninsula, the backstreet bars of Anchorage to the Yukon River, Hoagland traveled the “real” Alaska from top to bottom. Here he documents not only the flora and fauna of America’s last frontier, but also the extraordinary people living on the fringe. On his journey he chronicles the lives of an astonishing and unforgettable array of prospectors, trappers, millionaire freebooters, drifters, oilmen, Eskimos, Indians, and a remarkably kind and capable frontier nurse named Linda. In his foreword, novelist Howard Frank Mosher describes Edward Hoagland’s memoir as “the best book ever written about America’s last best place.” In the tradition of Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and Jonathan Rabin’s Old Glory, with a beautiful love story at its heart, this is an American masterpiece from a writer hailed by the Washington Post as “the Thoreau of our times.”

This is not the Africa of Isak Dinesen, nor the Africa of Joy Adamson. This is the Africa of civil wars and tribal massacres, where the Lord’s Resistance Army recruits child-soldiers after forcing them to kill their parents and eat their hearts. The aid workers who voluntarily subject themselves to life here are a breed of their own.Meet Hickey, an American school teacher in his late thirties, an American school teacher who burns his bridges with the school board and goes to Africa as an aid worker. Working for an agency in Nairobi, one of his jobs is to drive food and medical supplies to Southern Sudan to an aid station run by Ruth, a middle-aged woman, who acts as nurse, doctor, hospice worker, feeder of starving children, and witness. Ruth is gruff but efficient, and Hickey, who is usually drawn to youth and beauty, is struck by her devotion. Returning to Nairobi, he can’t forget what he has seen.When the violence and chaos in the region increase to a fever pitch and aid workers are being slaughtered or evacuated, Hickey is asked to save Ruth overland by Jeep. What happens to them and the children that have joined their journey is the searing climax of this novel. Hoagland paints an unflinching portrait of a living hell at its worst, and yet amid that suffering there is hope in the form of humility, sacrifice, and life-affirming friendship.

Edward Hoagland, best known for his essays, is also an extraordinary writer as fiction, as readers of his stories “The Final Fate of Alligators” and “Kwan's Coney Island” can attest. First published in periodicals such as The Paris Review, Esquire, The New Yorker, The American Review, and Saul Bellow's famous literary magazine, The Nobel Savage, Hoagland's stories amazed readers with their precise language and finely etched characters. He has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Short Stories. Assembled here are stories new and old, spanning from 1960 to today.Meet the death-defying motorcycle trick riders in the carnival's Devil's Tub, a man who keeps an alligator in his bathtub, a Chinese launder in Coney Island in search of love, a frontiersman who saves himself from a mauling grizzly bear by hiding in a beaver dam, three men from a circus looking for trouble at a rodeo, a washed out boxer trying to to hang onto his career, and dozens of others rich characters. From the cramped and gritty streets of New York City to the wide open spaces of the Old West, Hoagland's characters pine, ache, create, observe, love, learn, and live in such precisely rendered stories that we are transported into each of their peculiar worlds.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.