Bathsheba Demuth, whose essay on the Yukon I mentioned here recently, is probably best known for her prize-winning Floating Coast, an environmental history of the Bering Strait. A new account of that waterway — which separates Alaska and Russia, and is the only marine gateway between the icy Arctic and the Pacific Ocean — has just been published by Michael Engelhard, a wilderness guide and writer whose favourite “soulscapes” are canyon country and Alaska. Following books including Redrock Almanac: Canyon Country Vignettes and Ice Bear, a cultural history of the polar bear, his latest is No Place Like Nome:
The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City (Corax Books). From a place that began as a gold-rush camp in 1898, Engelhard — who lived in Nome himself for several years — surveys the seam that links two neighbouring continents. “The legacy of millennia comes to life in pages enriched by the writer’s recollections — from mammoths to Cold War monuments, from a spa turned orphanage to cyclist miners and a shaman whaler’s hoard.”