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Dec 9, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James
In the late 1990s, Megan Smetzer was an art history graduate student at Williams College in Massachusetts who hadn’t yet settled on a topic for her thesis. Having grown up in Fairbanks, she was interested in Athabascan beadwork. So she met with Aldona Jonaitis, who was then director of the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and now a lifelong friend.
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Nov 2, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James
“Arctic Song: Creation Stories from the Arctic”Germaine Arnaktauyok and Neil Christopher; Inhabit Media, 2024; 72 pages; $28.95. Every human society holds its own creation myths. For millennia, until science arrived with its factual but emotionally neutral explanations about what actually occurred, these myths explained life itself to those born into the cultures that created and lived by them.
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Oct 19, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James |Michael Engelhard
“What the River Knows: Essays from the Heart of Alaska”By Michael Engelhard; Hancock House Publishers Ltd, 2024; 324 pages; $24.95.
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Oct 5, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James
“Crooked on the Stretcher Board: Collected Essays on Gwich’in History, Language, and Folk Culture”By Craig Mishler, with Kenneth Drizhuu Frank; International Polar Institute Press, 2023; 432 pages; $45. By the early 1860s, white fur traders fanned across the arctic and subarctic North American lands of the Gwich’in peoples. Predictably, missionaries weren’t far behind.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James
This is part of Alaska Authors, an occasional series about authors and other literary figures with ties to the 49th state. For some time, Anchorage author Lynn Lovegreen watched the growing movement across the country to remove books from library shelves, especially in schools, with a growing sense of alarm. “As a retired secondary teacher, I have seen how important books are to teens,” Lovegreen said.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
academic.oup.com | David James
David James’ Property and its Forms in Classical German Philosophy is a book about the various forms of property that were proposed in the Classical German period (circa 1780–1860). James divides his book into four chapters, with a chapter each on Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Because it focuses primarily on these four figures, the book can be interpreted as an overview of this intellectual history.
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Sep 21, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James
“Hospital & Haven: The Life and Work of Grafton and Clara Burke in Northern Alaska”By Mary F. Ehrlander with Hild M. Peters; University of Nebraska Press, 2023; 360 pages; $34.95. In 1885, the Presbyterian cleric Sheldon Jackson, who came to Alaska with the intent of evangelizing, recognized the enormous size of the recently purchased territory and saw the futility of trying to usher his church to its every corner.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James
Last week, on the 23rd anniversary of a day that all of us who were old enough to understand what happened recall with horror, former President Donald Trump flew to New York City for a commemoration of those who died in what was one of the most unimaginable attacks ever committed on this country’s soil. He was accompanied while in transit by far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who has repeatedly called the 9/11 atrocities an inside job perpetrated by the United States government.
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Sep 7, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James |Mike Coppock
“The Oceanside History of Alaska”By Mike Coppock; Epicenter Press, 2024; 306 pages; $19.95. Like many Alaskans, I first arrived via the Alaska Marine Highway, in my case more than 34 years ago aboard a ferry from Bellingham. I’ve only traveled the Inside Passage twice and, tied to departure schedules, barely had time to alight and visit the towns that passed by so quickly. From Haines, I headed straight for the Interior and have never since lived elsewhere in the state.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
adn.com | David James
This is part of Alaska Authors, an occasional series about authors and other literary figures with ties to the 49th state. Jan Harper-Haines was a senior in high school when she took an elective writing class. “I was really enjoying it,” she said of the course, adding that her teacher “always read my stuff in the class, and she said, ‘You should write.’ ”Soon afterward, a fellow student echoed that sentiment. “I was so shocked,” she recalled.
