Summary and Reviews of Yukon Alone by John Balzar

Media Reviews

The Los Angeles Times Book Review Yukon Alone struck like a hammer blow to the ice of my preconceptions--it is really the best book on the Far North since Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams--and for that I am grateful to Balzar, an author skilled enough to survive the race, warped enough to understand the participants and literary enough to paint the big picture.

Library Journal ...this is truly a detailed and fascinating epic. While the author himself did not participate in the race, he spent many months acquainting himself with the racers and their all-important dogs.

Publishers Weekly Enthusiastically communicating his love of Alaska's captivating landscape and his attachment to the rugged eccentrics who make it home, Balzar introduces readers to the rigors of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race. ....Throughout, Balzar remains somewhat of a detached observer. He enjoys the company of the mushers he meets, but he is always somewhat apart from them, too much a part of the civilized world even as he celebrates the ways people can, at least briefly, separate themselves from civilization and follow their own demons wherever they may lead.

 David Petersen, author of Ghost Grizzlies and The Nearby Faraway Yukon Alone is an adventure story of the first order - a highly literary, eyewitness documentation of the world's longest, coldest, remotest, and most dangerous sled-dog race - a wholly true tale that's more suspenseful, riveting, and memorable than any fiction. And its score of Questing characters - from cabbie Dave Dalton to 'broad-shouldered' athletic beauty Aliy Zirkle - electrify these pages like the Northern Lights they are.

 Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness To spend time with sled dogs, and the men and women who dedicate their lives to them, is to witness a relationship at once so primary and so ineffable the temptation is to reduce oneself to murmurs and tears. John Balzar fights this temptation and tells this story of the Far North gracefully, with all the humor, honor, and slack-jawed wonder it deserves.

 Timothy Egan, author of The Good Rain and Lasso the Wind The true measure of a book like this is how well the author holds up as a companion. As a guide to one of the most compelling competitions of our time, John Balzar is funny, profane, honest, and ever-curious - a writer seemingly possessed by the ghost of Jack London. Yukon Alone may be the best book written about the Far North since John McPhee tramped through these latitudes a generation ago.