Journey - Softcover

James A. Michener was one of the world’s most popular writers, the author of more than forty books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific, the bestselling novels The Source, Hawaii, Alaska, Chesapeake, Centennial, Texas, Caribbean, and Caravans, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.

In straightforward, unadorned prose, Michener spins an old-fashioned historical adventure as he follows a British expedition's doomed trek across Canada to the Klondike gold fields in 1897-1899. The group's leader, Lord Evelyn Luton, is an arrogant ass whose colossal stubbornness costs the lives of three of the five men. Totally dissimilar is the party's poet, frail, sensitive Trevor Blythe. Accompanying the four well-bred Englishmen on the journey is a shrewd Irish poacher who acts as the "servant." Besides exploring class tensions, Michener offers insight into how the British viewed their two former colonies--America and Canada--at the turn of the century. But basically this is an absorbing little tale of hubris, courage and redemption (Lutton, humbled by the tragedy, goes on to help Lloyd George rearm England just before WW I), as the dazed adventurers meet Canadian hucksters and friendly Indians, and cope with frozen rivers, mosquitoes, scurvy, dwindling food. In an afterword, Michener explains the germination of this saga, expanded from a section cut from his much longer novel Alaska. Maps. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club dual main selections.
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