Koviashuvik: Making a Home in the Brooks Range

By Sam Wright

Book Overview

On a slope above a mountain lake in Alaska's Brooks Range, Sam and Billie Wright built a twelve-by-twelve-foot log cabin with hand tools and named it Koviashuvik--an Eskimo word meaning "living in the present moment with quiet joy and happiness." Sam's account of the twenty years they spent there is both a tale of wilderness survival and an inspiring meditation on the natural world and humanity's relationship to it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816517959
• ISBN13: 9780816517954
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A Journey through time

Sam Wright takes us to Kovishutok and his Koviashuvik through a prose that at first was halting in its simplicity. As one reads on, as it is clear one reviewer did not, the lithe of the language carries the story telling of native speach and perceptions. I have lived through this evolution of myths and new myths, but seldom have I read an odessy that contains insight, pathos, empathy, and as an aside, a love story with Sam's wife Billie. The Brooks range and Alaska come alive, are described in brillant detail, and historicaly chronicalized. I am a little closer to Koviashuvik in my own life for having read this book.

A must for hikers and rafters in the far north of Alaska

Sam and Billie lived in the Brooks Range in a 12 by 12 cabin, summer and winter for a dozen years. Sam's story is more than a cronicle of subsistence living in America's last great wilderness. Sam reintroduces us as a human community to a life that we have known but has been lost in our modern context. He asks questions that many of us are asking about our relationship to each other and the natural world. It is truly a spiritual journey. If you like Sam's book you might also like Billie Wright's book, Four Season's North, written about their first year in the far north.