Amazon.com
Fueled by a passion for running dogs, Gary Paulsen entered the Iditarod--the 1150-mile winter sled-dog race between Anchorage and Nome-- in dangerous ignorance and with a fierce determination.
Winterdance is his account of this seventeen-day battle against Nature's worst elements and his own frailty.
Book Description
Paulsen and his team of dogs endured snowstorms, frostbite, dogfights, moose attacks, sleeplessness, and hallucinations in the relentless push to go on. Map and color photographs.
Customer Reviews:
One of his best..........2007-08-10
I'm an educator who has been reading and recommending Paulsen books for quite awhile now. I had given this book to my husband for his birthday and began reading it aloud to him on a road trip. Shortly into the book we were both laughing aloud marveling at both the adventure and Paulsen's writing. This book does not disappoint, and readers will find out more about both the man and the "Madness"
The best yet!.......2007-06-14
There is a reason that this book has no less than a four and five star rating. It is the best read I have had in a very long time. Like the man sitting on the public bus, I tried to read this book sitting in a Doctor's office. I'm sure the patients in the waiting room were surprised I didn't come out in a straight jacket. Paulsen has once again created another great read. As a Siberian owner I too have some good stories of being drug down dusty roads screaming at the top of my lungs WHOA! The book is a great read even if you are not a dog owner. I love Paulsen's love for nature and his choice to rough it rather than contribute to it. I'm sure the choice was not easy and the life style a balance between wants and needs. Pick it up and read it then pass it along to a friend who needs a good laugh.
-S
Wonderful!.......2007-06-02
This is by far one of the most enjoyable books on the topic for a long time. The author uses humour in such a gorgeous way to make his points, I laughed so bad my girlfriend thought I'd fall off the couch when I read about both the dog-training and the race itself. Having experience with sleddogs myself, I found it very easy to identify myself with the author's experiences.
fantastic. Read it from cover to cover in one sitting!.......2007-05-02
Once I picked it up I couldn't stop. This is an action packed, yet, informative read.
It's an inspiring, yet tragic tale of a man's battle with the unknown. Some of the things that this guy goes through are just insane! Not just for dog lovers! This is a truly great book.
Winter Dance.......2007-04-07
Winter Dance gives a comical and yet realistic glimpse of what the Alaskan Iditarod Race is all about. After reading this account, I understood the running of the dogs and the human challenges and I laughed all along the way.
Book Description
You say you want to own your business. You say you want to work around dogs. Self-service dog washes have been around for twenty years but many, many communities still do not have one. You say this would be the perfect small business for you to start. This is the book that tells you how do it. Author Doug Gelbert distills his experience from tens of thousands of dirty dogs in his shops in Delaware and Pennsylvania into Starting And Running A Do-It-Yourself Dog Wash. The book is divided into over 30 easily digested topics that take the would-be-business owner through every imaginable aspect of do-it-yourself dog washes (see table of contents). The book is printed in a user-friendly spiral binding that lays open flat for the easiest possible access and quick reference. In addition to the covered topics there are 32 dog wash-specific forms that you can tear out or copy for your business:
Cash Flow Variance Repor
Comment Card
Customer Questionnaire
Customer Release Form
Demographic Matrix
Emergency Report
Employee Application Form
Employee Confidentiality Agreement
Employee Personal Data Form
Employment Questionnaire
Frequent BatherÕs Club Application
Guest Book Sheets
Income Variance Report
Introductory Period Agreement
Job Description Form
ManagerÕs Daily Summary Report
ManagerÕs Job Agreement
Monthly Demographic Totals
Pet Sitter Record
Supplies Control Log
Tip Sheets
Car Travel With Your Dog
Chocolate Is Poison!
Home Pet Clipping
How To Clip Toenails
How To Pet A Dog
Proper Brushing
The Perfect Dog Bath
Your Dog and Summer
Your Dog and Winter
Vendor Data Sheet
Weekly Money In/Out
Customer Reviews:
We built this city.......2007-06-13
This tome became the rock upon which the empire of Dogwash City was built. I can quote it like a preacher quotes gospel. There are parts of this book without which my near monopoly of the do-it-yourself Dog Wash industry in Flat Combs, Idaho would not have been possible. Especially the part about making sure you use extra soap and shampoo when the dog in question is particularly dirty from dirt, mud, dust, cola....ANYTHING that could get a dog dirty. I highly recommend this to anyone looking to build their own city
Book Description
Follows the journey of racing in the Iditarod, from a female perspective.
Customer Reviews:
Great Page-turner.......2007-08-08
As others who reviewed this book, I too met the author and her husband, but not in Alaska, but in Belize, Central America of all places! After a sailing trip in a group, my friend and I had breakfast with them one morning. Off-handedly, she mentioned the experience and book. 7 months later after looking at some photos, I was reminded of it, and sent for it.
What a nice surprise! I Loved it! Not only was it interesting and inspiring, but the girl can write too! I cried several times and cheered her on. I'm passing it on to my neighbor for her trip this weekend. My only regret is that I hadn't known about her or her book before we met briefly. I would have talked her ear off with questions. So, when's the movie coming out!
chance encounter.......2007-07-19
On a recent trip to Alaska's Denali National Park, my wife and I were fortunate to have an extremely knowledgeable tour guide who had spent the last 27 years in Alaska, first as a commercial fisherman(or fisherwoman) and now as a dog trainer/fisherman/tour guide. Only in passing, at the end of our delightful 8 hour tour, did she mention that she had completed the Iditarod (at age 42). Seeing this obviously healthy, energetic, and outgoing person and hearing this rather incredible story certainly piqued our interest. As we were leaving, she also mentioned that she had written an account of her adventure "Running with Champions". At our first stop, at the Denali Wilderness Center, we found the book and both of us read it in the next three days. I only hope that Alaskan travelers can have the pleasure of Lisa's company on the Denali tour and share in her story and extensive knowledge of this great state and National Park. If Alaska isn't in your plans, please read this book and share Lisa's love of life, dogs, and the challenges of the Alaska frontier.
Terrific book.......2007-05-31
I visited Alaska this year in early March during the week before the Iditerod and went to Lisa Frederic's book signing, bought the book, and absolutely loved it. She has the insight, humility and sense of humor to convey the exhilaration and the strain of this adventure. She was also very accessible and easy to talk to, brought her dogs with her, and read just enough of the book to make me want to buy it and read it. This book helped me understand and appreciate the race and the time I spent in Alaska. I can not recommend it enough.
Running With Champions: A Midlife Journey on the Iditarod Trail.......2007-05-29
Awesome book! Very well written, enjoyable to read and inspiring. If she can do it, so can I! This book reaffirms the fact that with desire, perseverance and tenacity you can attempt the impossible and be successful, regardless of your age!
Mushing Adventure.......2007-03-26
Here is a simple yet exciting story about running a dog team in the Iditarod dogsled race -- about the dogs, the trail, the weather, and the delightful musher. Lisa Frederic, the author of this autobiography, grew up in Kentucky, went to college in Montana, and spent 20 years fishing for salmon out of Kodiak, Alaska, before discovering sled dogs.
As a middle-aged tourist in 1997, Frederic visited Nome to see the end of the annual Iditarod race. The next year she became a volunteer at checkpoints along the race trail, but that only whet her appetite for more. She continued to volunteer at checkpoints for each race, and she took an unpaid job as a dog handler in the lot of a major musher, Jeff King. In 2002 she ran King's puppy team in the Iditarod. The dogs were young, this was a training run for them, and Frederic took them the entire 1,200 miles to Nome.
In her direct and modest style, Frederic recalls the humor and the danger of the situations she got into. She describes the process of learning how to mush, the initial races to prepare dogs and musher for the big one, the frustrations, the injuries, the storms, and the joys. This is Frederic's story, yet she weaves in the support of her husband David, as well as the support of friends, strangers, and other mushers. Frederic finished in 47th place in a race that 64 mushers had started and 55 would complete. Not bad for a 42-year rookie.
Fortunately, Frederic is also a talented storyteller and gifted writer. This book is a fun read, an informative account of mushing and the Iditarod, and an adventure story. I highly recommend it.
Book Description
Lucas, a musician and translator living in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, comes home one day to find a cryptic invitation to a local art gallery slipped under his door. When he appears at the appointed time, he sets in motion a series of improbable, seemingly interconnected events that disrupt his previously passive existence. He meets the alluring Nuria and they begin an intense love affair. He is approached by a band of Barcelona’s mythic roof dwellers and has a run-in with a fire-eating prophet. But when he and Nuria are kidnapped by a religious cult with roots stretching back to the thirteenth century, Lucas realizes that his life is spinning out of control.
The cult’s megalomaniac leader, Ponteuf, maintains that Nuria and Lucas are essential to his plan to revive the religion. While Nuria is surprisingly open to Ponteuf and his theories, Lucas is outraged and makes his escape. Back in Barcelona, Lucas wanders the streets in a drug-and-alcohol-induced haze, pining for Nuria and struggling to make sense of what happened to him. He recounts his improbable adventures to his friends, who are wholly entertained by the story and deeply doubtful of its truth, a skepticism that is exacerbated by Lucas’s tendency to use the third person and flaunt different narrative styles.
A love story, tale of adventure, historical thriller, and evocative tour of Barcelona, THE COLOR OF A DOG RUNNING AWAY is a dazzling blend of the surreal and the ordinary, a novel that beguiles and disturbs in equal measure.
Customer Reviews:
The Magus-lite.......2007-08-21
A blatant rip-off of the incomparable The Magus (John Fowles) without an acknowledgement in sight. Not even a nod to T.S. Eliot for The Wasteland line (mon semblable, mon frere). That said, it was readable and mildly interesting despite the creaky plotting and lack of originality.
Recommended -- Refreshingly different and literate.......2007-07-20
I finished Richard Gywn's The Color of a Dog Running Away last night. Whilst I enjoyed the book overall, the last half doesn't sustain the excellence of the first half. A very good read, nonetheless; refreshingly different and literate. The Barcelona setting is a delight throughout. The Cathar theme is inspired. Recommended.
(3.5) "Had not Adam been seduced by Eve?".......2007-03-26
Set in late 90s Barcelona ("a city on the brink, infatuated with its own improbability"), this strange tale of love and obsession involves Rhys Lucas, a thirty-three year old ex-pat grad school dropout and the seductive, enigmatic Nuria Rasavall, lovers who meet after a mysterious postcard appears in Lucas' apartment, their attraction incendiary and immediate. Consumed with his new affair, Lucas grows careless of his responsibilities, easily distracted by Nuria, although he admits to a vague sensation of being watched. One late evening, Lucas is visited by the "roof people" while his lover sleeps; the roof people are silent as ninjas, hopping the rooftops of the sleeping city, sometimes to steal, others to watch. Cocooned in his earthly bliss, Lucas takes this visitation as a mere curiosity, but later, when he and Nuria are kidnapped by masked strangers, he has cause to wonder what else he has missed in his preoccupation.
Isolated in an ascetic cell somewhere in the Pyrenees, Lucas comes face to face with Andre Pontneuf, the leader of a Cathar sect that mirrors one from the thirteenth century, the heretical group persecuted relentlessly by the Church in this part of the world. Believing that he is the reincarnation of the Cathar's leader, Bernard Rocher, Pontneuf suggests that Lucas may now inhabit the body of his betrayer, both of them replaying the earlier drama in modern times. During his interrogation by Pontneuf, Lucas is restricted from seeing Nuria; the suspicion slowly grows that she may have been an active agent in their abduction. Escaping his confinement, Lucas returns to the streets of Barcelona and his odd friends, lost in a drugged fugue, yearning for the early days of his enchantment with Nuria. Although he has reason to doubt her, the young man cannot help hoping for a rapprochement with his lady love, alternately seduced and repulsed by the experience.
Although the prologue suggests a distance from the actual event, a year in which Lucas attempts to put his tale into words, the actual story weaves between fact and fantasy, from elaborate discussions with friends who think Lucas has imagined everything and the self-doubt that plagues the protagonist. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect is the city itself, filled with a disparate history and the power struggles of a dominant religious and cultural heritage. Lucas' spiritual quest, if indeed there is more to his life than anticipated, remains an unsolved mystery, the ex-pat caught between the ancient past and the all too real present. Luan Gaines/ 2007.
Customer Reviews:
take the last review with a pinch of salt!.......2005-07-22
True this book is written by an Englishman.
SO WHAT?
Replace references to 'HM' with 'Federal...'
If the info in the book is not relevant to the US, at least the book has drawn awareness to this aspect, and the correct data can be quickly found on the internet. Thus the book is almost as valuable to an American as it is to a Brit.
If the rest of the world buy hundreds of thousands of books written for an American market, surely America can do the equivalent?
(American) Buyer Beware.......2005-03-15
This book is of limited value to American kennel owners. Imagine my surprise when I opened this guide and was referred to Her Majesty's Customs and Excise Tax for VAT. Six of 11 Chapters are specific to the U.K., and the references in the two appendices will do little good unless your target audience is British expats.
I urge Mr. Cavill to consider drafting a U.S. edition, and Amazon should make clear that this is a U.K. publication.
Book Description
Gator's greyhound friends are leaving the track for a life of big yards and endless treats. He wonders, Why can't a champ be such a lucky pup? What follows is his secret quest to become a family pet. No more cramped kennel. No more racing muzzle. Gator soon discovers a new world filled with things strange, scary and ultimately rewarding.
Customer Reviews:
Love it!.......2007-03-27
As a greyhound adopter and a Mom, I love this book! It is informative, entertaining and heart warming. The artwork is lovely, and the verses are easy to read and understand for toddlers through kids age 8.
Book Description
32 pp. four color illustration
"Running with the Big Dogs" invites children of all ages to mush along with the sled dogs in the heart of Denali National Park, Alaska. Share the wonder of a Denali sled dog puppy as you follow him through his first year of adventure and learning. Experience the special bond between rangers and sled dogs as they patrol to preserve the wilderness of Denali during the harsh Alaskan winter.
Customer Reviews:
Sled Dogs Run Away With Child's Heart................2000-02-17
I had the good fortune of growing up with Lori Yanuchi in a little place called Allentown, PA. What I didnt know back then was her talent for writing and zest for the outdoors! My hat goes off to Lori for capturing the hearts of young children and the young at heart with this great book "Running with the Big Dogs"! My boys were entertained and educated about Alaska and are waiting impatiently for her next book.....no pressure Lori! This book is not a dust collector!
Average customer rating:
- Excellent Do's and Don'ts
- Annoying title; really good book.
|
Running With Man's Best Friend
Davia Anne Gallup
Manufacturer: Alpine Pubns Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Veterinary Medicine
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Animal Husbandry
| Agricultural Sciences
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0931866251 |
Customer Reviews:
Excellent Do's and Don'ts.......2000-04-19
Dogs breeds vary widely in their ability to run longer distances and how frequently. This book spells out differences owners need to take into account. General guidelines about age to begin, how to start, etc., are extremely helpful. The author's background as a runner and her own experience running with her dog and organizing the first dog/owner run, coupled with the input of veterinary experts, makes this book extremely valuable to dog owners who want to run with their dog.
Annoying title; really good book........1997-10-31
I don't know who made the author -- or who let the author -- use such a stupid title. The author's a woman, for starters, and running dogs are a great safety boon to female runners. Notwithstanding the title, the book is quite good. It contains general information for novice human and dog runners; it contains charts and reviews about the running ability of different breeds; and it contains detailed information about training and first aid for your running dog. Well worth the price.
Average customer rating:
- The plot could be the counterplot
- Early, "lesser" DeLillo...but still worth your time.
- A Superior Early DeLillo Novel
- Excellent
- Like espionage, smut or Chimp's in suits?
|
Running Dog
Don DeLillo
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
DeLillo, Don
| ( D )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Similar Items:
-
The Names
-
Players
-
Ratner's Star
-
Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction)
-
Mao II: A Novel
ASIN: 0679722947
Release Date: 1989-07-17 |
Book Description
DeLillo's
Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to "star" Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace,
Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.
Customer Reviews:
The plot could be the counterplot.......2007-05-27
I'm not a big reader of crime fiction, although I do have a stack of Raymond Chandler books that I swear I'll get to one day. It does seem to me though that a lot of writers want to write Chandler style crime stories but because they're supposed to be post-modern they have to put some kind of odd existential spin on it, as if modern audiences can't handle something straightforward, relatively speaking. Of course, the other theory is that the author is just shoehorning their typical style into a genre they don't normally write in, which may be more the case here. What you have are all the usual elements of a Deillo story but adapted into a gritty noiresque tale so that everything gets kind of tweaked, the dialogue taking being a bit sharper and tougher but still definitely his semi-ironic style where people talk past each other and treat conversations more as a game to be won. His descriptions become a bit more honed, a bit leaner while still maintaining an eye for detail, but you get the idea that if this wasn't supposed to be a detective story then it would take twice as long to get to the end. The plot revolves around people trying to secure a film of what may be an amateur adult video made in the final days of WWII in Hitler's bunker, so you have people of power manuevering for it as well as folks involved in the erotic black market (as in "selling illegal adults products", not a sexy underground) and a spunky yet hardbitten reporter trying to piece it all together. Maybe. The central plot itself doesn't really seem that important as much as an excuse for a lot of entertaining scenes of people attempting to manipulate the crap out of each other and talk tough and try to decipher what the heck else everyone is planning. You have double agents and questionable motives and twists and it actually is a lot of fun in a weary and doom-laden fashion, the book reads a lot faster than I thought it would, but once you figure out that the plot is more or less window dressing for the stylistic hijinks, it gets easier. Thus the characters are more like caricatures and no one really develops but that doesn't seem to be the point. Tellingly the most effective part of the novel is when they finally screen the film and that feels the most like a true Delillo novel in its starkness. But while it's fun and everything, there's not much in the novel to really stick with you. I'm sure Delillo was taking it all quite seriously but it basically amounts to a extremely well written genre exercise. Worth the time but don't expect your life to be altered.
Early, "lesser" DeLillo...but still worth your time........2007-02-05
Having recently read several of his excellent later novels ((*White Noise,* *Libra,* *Mao II,* *Cosmopolis*)), I was primed to be disappointed by this earlier DeLillo effort...and I wasn't disappointed in my expectation that I'd be disappointed.
*Running Dog* is a curious novel--a kind of metaphysical/existential detective story written in a sometimes jarringly noir style. This is the kind of novel in which the men all sound tough and jaded and so do all the women. No one actually calls anyone a `dame,' but it seems like they could at any moment. Its that kind of dialogue, especially in the early going, and it takes some time to adjust yourself to this cliché detective-fiction patois, especially if youre accustomed to the exquisite dialogue of DeLillo's later work. But you do adjust, and it does get better eventually, and by the end the novel hits its stride.
The "mystery" surrounds the legend of a film shot in Hitler's bunker at the end of World War II. There are rumors that its a Nazi porno flick starring the studly Fuhrer himself. Thats quite a juicy tidbit to build a novel around--I mean, how could anyone resist reading about that?--and DeLillo does a good job keeping one's decadent appetite `aroused' throughout although whats really on that film ends up being a shock a lot different than what you probably are imagining.
That's not a complaint, necessarily. *Running Dog* is, in the end, a `serious' novel with many of the themes that will eventually re-emerge more powerfully in DeLillo's masterworks. So, despite its detective-story trappings, you shouldnt look for the kind of neat resolution you might expect from genre detective fiction. That kind of resolution is not a part of DeLillo's world, not even this early in his writing career.
All in all, *Running Dog* is an interesting, literate, if not quite literary, thinking-man's page turner--250 pages of entertainment that doesnt insult the intelligence.
A Superior Early DeLillo Novel.......2007-01-10
Originally published in 1978, 'Running Dog' is a provocative novel of ideas brilliantly disguised as a political thriller. It's also, incidentally, a wonderful time capsule of Seventies Americana and paranoia. Reviewers who criticize the book's lack of character development or large cast are missing the point of this novel (and much of DeLillo's fiction). Don DeLillo is a hyperintelligent, hyperliterate novelist who's in the business of upsetting our expectations, not fulfilling them. Case in point: this book begins like a police procedural (two NYPD cops discover a murdered corpse); we think we know where things are going; but instead of giving us the mystery story we expect, DeLillo curveballs his readers into a seriously twisted (in all senses of the word) story of political conspiracies, pornography, the mob, a film from Hitler's bunker, and much else...And those two cops from the beginning of the book? They vanish. We never see them again...
Bottom line: 'Running Dog' is a wild ride. Hop on. You won't regret it.
Excellent.......2006-07-10
Everything I like in a novel is here - humor, darkness, and strange and lusty wounded characters with noir capabilities. DeLillo has a knack for holding your hand down into some black tunnels and just when you are beginning to wonder how solid the ground you are standing on is he lets go. A terrific piece of fiction.
Like espionage, smut or Chimp's in suits?.......2005-03-31
The characteristic strongest in Running Dog is ominous suspense, a coming-to from any angle. While it suffers from the De Lillo style of excessive psycho-analysis/stream of consciousness association, it is made up of meetings, usually between two people, sometimes three, in varied and interesting places.
An airplane sauna, in a car heading south on a straight highway, a Nude Reading room, an art gallery/apartment, a vollyball court in Central Park where tennis is being played, a limousine with St. Bernard puppies, a fire escape, magazine offices, an abandoned espionage training facility, a motel in the woods, a minibus, Capitol Hill, a Georgetown home, an apartment roof, and more.
At these places peoples jockey for information or sexual connection, seeking the treasure which incites them all, directly and indirectly into a void of contact and codes.
I found Running Dog engrossing, and was amazed at De Lillo's capacity for langauge and image. His dialogue scenes begin without formality and are influenced as much by the memory or his characters as their present intentions.
Searching for a long lost film which may or may not come to rank as a legendary smut film, over a dozen characters cross paths in attempts toward victory and knowledge. Time and space shifts across the country, and an America of double and triple dealings, hidden collections and taboo tastes, lost and won partnerships skirts along toward understood oblivion.
Average customer rating:
- Excellent book!
- A family who followed their dream one special winter
- awesome
- Great Adventure
- Enduring Determination
|
Running North: A Yukon Adventure
Ann Mariah Cook
Manufacturer: Algonquin Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Dogs
| Animal Care & Pets
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
Dogs & Wolves
| Animals
| Biological Sciences
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Winter Sports
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Sports
| Subjects
| Books
Guidebooks
| Reference & Tips
| Travel
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Alaska
| States
| United States
| Travel
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Adventure
| Specialty Travel
| Travel
| Subjects
| Books
Action & Adventure
| Genre Fiction
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1565122534 |
Amazon.com
Alaska is more than just the largest state in the Union; it's also a state of mind, as Ann Mariah Cook found out. Together with her husband, 3-year-old daughter, and 32 purebred Siberian huskies, she moved there from New Hampshire in order to train for the legendary Yukon Quest, the most rigorous sled-dog race in the world. Her tough, thoughtful memoir, Running North, chronicles the ordeals as well as the rewards of their mushers' life. In the course of their transformation from cheechakos, or greenhorns, to sourdoughs, or seasoned Alaskans, Cook and her husband learned to defend themselves and their dogs from extreme weather, adapted to mushing in Alaskan conditions, and even absorbed the niceties of Yukon social customs (hint: always put on a pot of coffee for visitors). The book ends with a harrowing account of the race, complete with packs of wolves, howling blizzards, minus-60-degree temperatures, and a few narrow escapes. But this is as much Ann's story as it is her husband's, and as a result it goes far beyond the confines of a simple adventure story. Full of intriguing glimpses into sled-dog (and musher) psychology as well as lyrical observations about the beauty of the Yukon landscape, Running North is as much concerned with the who and why of adventure as with its how and when. Leaving behind the comfort and security of Cook's New England life required a multitude of adjustments, from the design of the dogs' booties to a new appreciation of interior decorating, Alaska-style. In the end, however, it was going home that proved hard: "Returning to New Hampshire, I saw my life as a stranger might view it. I could not get used to so many houses, so many neighbors, so many social demands. Everything in my life had been redefined in only seven and a half months." --Mary Park
Book Description
Now in paperback, the acclaimed story of a family's struggle to complete the world's most grueling dogsled race.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent book!.......2003-06-04
Running North is an excellent book for anyone interested in Alaska or mushing. Ann Mariah Cook captures the feel for Alaska and dog sledding perfectly. Even if you have no true interest in the subject you will find your self swept into the wonderful world of dog sledding. Cook clearly brings to life the people they met, friends they made, and the hazards that tried to stop them from running the Yukon Quest. One of the most grueling races in the world. I found I learned a great deal from this book without it ever becoming boring or slowing down. And most importantly she tells about the dogs, the wonderful creatures who work so willingly for us. Sometimes heartbreaking sometime funny, this book is an interesting, exciting read for anyone.
A family who followed their dream one special winter.......2001-03-03
Subtitled, "A Yukon Adventure," Ann Mariah Cook's fascinating 1998 memoir chronicles the time in 1992 that she, her husband George and three-year old daughter moved to Alaska to participate in the Yukon Quest, the toughest sled dog race in the world. It was George who ran the race; Ann was the one who drove the truck, carried the gear, took care of their daughter and gave him moral support through the long months of training, and eventually through the grueling event.
I've read other books about dog mushing, but this one had the unique point of view of a woman who, while not actually on the sled during the race, experienced her own Yukon Quest experience. She writes clearly and honestly, not shying away from the disagreement that she had with the young woman they brought with them to act as the official "handler" of the dogs. She writes about George's experience on the trail, his frostbite, fatigue, narrow escapes and indomitable spirit as he pitted himself against natural forces over which he had little control. She writes about the dogs, their personalities and backgrounds and about the tough choices she and George had to make when it came time to pick the actual team of 12 out of their much larger group. She writes about the people they meet along the way, her Alaskan neighbors, fisherman, storekeepers and the other mushers. And she writes about Alaska itself, making me yearn to experience its beauty and majesty.
There was one small line drawing of the Yukon Quest trail and I kept returning to it again and again as the book moved along and the tension mounted. There is also a photo of Ms. Cook and one of her dogs on the back cover. I wish there were more photos, but I didn't really need them because her descriptions were so clear. Recommended.
awesome.......2000-09-28
This book was one of the greatest ones I have ever read. I race sled dogs, and I found it so interesting...I could and have felt everything they go through. Also my grandmother who bought the book for me said she started reading it one night and read it the whole thing that night, and she has never raced and knows nothing about it, and she LOVED it. So it is a good book for anyone to read!!
Great Adventure.......1999-12-26
What a pleasant surprise to read a literary and exciting story of Alaska and dog-racing. Thoroughly enjoyable. I totally recommend this book to all adventure lovers.
Enduring Determination.......1999-12-13
Fascinating details of the "Cook Team" in the greuling Yukon Quest are revealed in this book. Ann and her husband move to Alaska from the eastern United States so that they can experience "real" dog sled racing. Their adventure is difficult from the beginning; however, they eventually grow to love the Alaskan atmosphere. Despite much adversity, from friends and neighbors, about their inexperience, George and Ann enter the Yukon Quest. Details about survival, cultural adjustment, and everlasting memories are enriched in this educational book about the Yukon Quest.
Books:
- You Hear Me?: Poems and Writing by Teenage Boys (Betsy Franco Yas)
- 1949: A Novel of the Irish Free State (Irish Century)
- A Crazy Little Thing Called Death: A Blackbird Sisters Mystery
- A Day with a Perfect Stranger
- A Lady At Last (de Warenne Dynasty)
- A Restless Knight (The Dragons of Challon, Book 1)
- A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds
- America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
- American Corrections (with InfoTrac )
- Back on Blossom Street (The Knitting Books #3)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Microeconomics Study Guide
- History: Fiction or Science
- Connecting the Dots: Aligning Projects with Objectives in Unpredictable Times
- Bridge Basics 2: Competitive Bidding
- Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
- Flight Volume 2
- Global Aggression: The Case for World Standards and Bold US Action Challenging Philip Morris and RJR
- Fundamentals of Intermediate Accounting, w/Take Action! CD and 3M Annual Report, Problem Solving Sur
- Corporate Governance and Chairmanship: A Personal View
- The Complete Enderby : Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, the Clockwork Testament, Enderby's Dark
My Life in Dog Years
Race Across Alaska: First Woman to Win the Iditarod Tells Her Story
Guts
Dogteam
Dogs of the Iditarod
