Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club dual main selections. But when he describes the experience of extreme cold in the book he again writes total fiction (actually, the real experience probably wasn't dramatic. In an afterword, Michener explains the germination of this saga, expanded from a section cut from his much longer novel Alaska. Michener actually spent a few days in Eagle, Alaska (on the Yukon River), where the then-president of the Eagle Historical Society had to host him at her house, during a period of extreme cold. He eased his workload by employing researchers and an editor to take care of much of. But basically this is an absorbing little tale of hubris, courage and redemption (Lutton, humbled by the tragedy, goes on to help Lloyd George rearm England just before WW I), as the dazed adventurers meet Canadian hucksters and friendly Indians, and cope with frozen rivers, mosquitoes, scurvy, dwindling food. Michener suffered a serious heart attack in 1964, but his recovery was excellent and he continued writing. Accompanying the four well-bred Englishmen on the journey is a shrewd Irish poacher who acts as the ``servant.'' Besides exploring class tensions, Michener offers insight into how the British viewed their two former colonies-America and Canada-at the turn of the century. Totally dissimilar is the party's poet, frail, sensitive Trevor Blythe. The group's leader, Lord Evelyn Luton, is an arrogant ass whose colossal stubbornness costs the lives of three of the five men. In straightforward, unadorned prose, Michener spins an old-fashioned historical adventure as he follows a British expedition's doomed trek across Canada to the Klondike gold fields in 1897-1899.
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