If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska »

Heather Lende has contributed to the Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s Morning Edition, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Alaska Magazine. She is a columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and for the Alaska Dispatch, an award-winning web-paper on all things Alaska.

Tiny Haines, Alaska, is ninety miles north of Juneau, accessible mainly by water or air—and only when the weather is good. There’s no traffic light and no mail delivery; people can vanish without a trace, and funerals are community affairs. Heather Lende posts both the obituaries and the social column for the local newspaper. If anyone knows the goings-on in this close-knit town—from births to weddings to funerals—she does.

Whether contemplating the mysterious death of eccentric Speedy Joe, who never took off his hat—not even for a haircut; researching the details of a one-legged lady gold miner’s adventurous life; observing the Chilkat Bald Eagle Festival; or ice skating in the shadow of glacier-studded mountains, Lende’s warm, folksy style brings us inside her busy life.We meet her husband, Chip, who owns the local lumber yard, their five children, and a colorful assortment of friends and neighbors, including aging hippies, salty fisherman, native Tlingit Indians, and volunteer undertakers, as well as the moose, eagles, sea lions, and bears with whom they share this wild and perilous land.

Publishers Weekly

Lende chronicles the various lives and deaths of the people of Haines, Alaska, an almost inaccessible hamlet 90 miles north of Juneau. In writing her social and obituary columns for Haines's Chilkat Valley News-some of which are included here-she blends reportage and humor. Lende has lived in Haines all her adult life and is well-known in town. She deftly illuminates local color: the sewer plant manager who rides a motorcycle and sports a ZZ Top beard, the high school principal who moonlights as a Roy Orbison impersonator, and the one-legged female gold miner. Lende covers death in her community in all its forms-accidental, intentional and inevitable-and notes, "writing about the dead helps me celebrate the living." While comic, the book also has some sensitive, insightful anecdotes. For example, Lende, a contributor to NPR's Morning Edition, portrays the building of a coffin for a beloved mother by her youngest daughter; the sinking of a family boat with a tender farewell for a fearless fisherman; the mourning of a quirky, civic-minded "aging hippie"; and the goodbye to a Texas woman who hosted an annual Mississippi blues party. Lende's picture of an Alaskan small town is colorful and captivating. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.