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A review by bmwpalmer
The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier & the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum
3.0
Interesting enough to keep me reading, but only just. The story is very surface-level, with lots of glossed-over periods of history and summarized, paraphrased conversations. I think this could have been a much longer, in-depth book, but for some reason the author chose to only tell one particular strain of a much wider story.
When I was 14, my family went to Alaska and we spent (what seemed to me) a lot of time in Skagway. We also visited Dyea. That really helped me visualize parts of the book, although I was surprised to learn that Soapy Smith was a really bad guy. In Skagway, I remember him being presented to the tourists as kind of a mildly evil, harmless, entertaining henchman.
I remember Dyea being especially affecting, so I was touched to read this reflection on that place by one of the book's main characters, George Carmack:
"On Christmas Eve, surrounded by his loneliness, he recalled an image from the previous summer and began to write: 'But a whispering comes from the tall old spruce/And my soul from the pain is free.' His mind had been yearning, and in its desperation it had found a new destination. He focused on a clear, idyllic picture of the hewn-log trading post in Dyea that looked out on a 'tall old spruce' and an inlet of shimmering blue water. The fine bright beauty of the setting had affected him when he'd first encountered it, and in a burse of sentimental emotion he found himself traveling back to it on Christmas Eve in his poem."
When I was 14, my family went to Alaska and we spent (what seemed to me) a lot of time in Skagway. We also visited Dyea. That really helped me visualize parts of the book, although I was surprised to learn that Soapy Smith was a really bad guy. In Skagway, I remember him being presented to the tourists as kind of a mildly evil, harmless, entertaining henchman.
I remember Dyea being especially affecting, so I was touched to read this reflection on that place by one of the book's main characters, George Carmack:
"On Christmas Eve, surrounded by his loneliness, he recalled an image from the previous summer and began to write: 'But a whispering comes from the tall old spruce/And my soul from the pain is free.' His mind had been yearning, and in its desperation it had found a new destination. He focused on a clear, idyllic picture of the hewn-log trading post in Dyea that looked out on a 'tall old spruce' and an inlet of shimmering blue water. The fine bright beauty of the setting had affected him when he'd first encountered it, and in a burse of sentimental emotion he found himself traveling back to it on Christmas Eve in his poem."