Somewhere between myths and hard facts you find Nome, poised also between yesterday and tomorrow. Drawing on his background in anthropology and an equal passion for history, Michael Engelhard surveys the seam that links two neighboring continents through the lens of one pivotal city.
Not a history in the formal sense, and Engelhard makes little to no effort at offering such a narrative. A writer who is at his best when using the essay as his form, he sets a general theme with each chapter, and then lets his account follow his mind wherever it goes ... Through a cascading series of memorable sentences, he takes us on a spiraling tour of all that follows ... Engelhard is a wordsmith with few equals among Alaska’s many talented writers. Were it not for copyright considerations and lack of space, I’d simply submit the entire introduction for a review and leave it at that ... Anecdotally-detailed is a good way to describe the earliest pages of this book, which fly by in an almost Kerouacian manner. Engelhard alights here, there, and elsewhere, his approach a bit dizzying. But the effect is to highlight how complex this seemingly simple place is.
Engelhard’s style is so light-hearted and welcoming, it is tempting to imagine he just sat down and wrote No Place Like Nome with barely a pause. As an ethnographer and longtime wilderness guide, he travels with readers from prehistoric mastodons and mammoths to the present day, through the gold rush at the turn of the 20th century ... This is a grand book, instructive, revealing, above all entertaining, a gratifying escape.
The stories do indeed range all over the Bering Strait, and Nome itself, while a convenient hook on which to hang the collection, becomes an increasingly distant and somewhat arbitrary point of reference, all but absent in most of the chapters ... These are enjoyably varied, however, and whatever the subject, Engelhard’s bite-sized nuggets convey the information in an easy-going, approachable style. Some of the most memorable include a chapter on the great photographer Edward Curtis ... Fascinating ... The book ends with a charming sketch of the most unexpected mode of Arctic transport, the bicycle ... It encapsulates the quirky appeal of this enjoyable grab-bag of assorted Arcticiana.
