Alaska journey, 1919-1934: An adventurous young Norwegian's coming-of-age - Softcover

Soberg, Ralph

9780962542961: Alaska journey, 1919-1934: An adventurous young Norwegian's coming-of-age

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0962542962 ISBN 13: 9780962542961

Publisher: Hardscratch Press, 1993

Ralph Soberg was born in a manger-literally-and raised-literally-on a rock. He spent much of his young life raising hell. That life moderated somewhat, if only because there's just so much hell-raising you could get away with in a strict Norwegian farming-and-fishing family. When Ralph's family moved from a tiny Village 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle to what was supposed to be a better life in the New World, you'd have thought they might pick something more comfortable or more promising than a huge rock in Alaska' Shumagin Islands, at the head of the Aleutian chain. Not surprising that they called their rocky farm and stokkfisk station "Hardscratch." And after 85 years of doing everything from hardhat driving and bootlegging o bridge-building, it's not surprising that Soberg can build a book from scratch. What is surprising is that after three earlier, well-built books about his work and life, he still has a lot of wonderful stories to tell. These are the stories I knew were just under the surface of the earlier books, stories about parents and siblings and neighbors and other pioneers-and they were that in every sense-carving a subsistence and a future out of hard time and hard places.

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