Peter Jenkins

The author's chronicle of his year-long trek through Alaska introduces the people and places of the nation's "last frontier."

Looking for Alaska

Micah

0/5 stars.

Peter Jenkins starts out this memoir with a vignette about a dull bike ride where he only vaguely describes his surroundings, often not providing connecting context or doing so in a linear fashion. And then, the second vignette is about a bear attack. Way to bore the readers into putting the book down before something vaguely interesting happens. As I found out, this was a theme throughout the book. Jenkins would intersperse his few high octane adventures in Alaska with poorly worded and disjointed prose and "thoughtful" reflection that tried its hardest to be provocative but only ended up being frustratingly dull. The saving graces of the book were the pictures and Rebekah's contributions. Unlike her father, Rebekah wrote with a rawness that Peter Jenkins did not have. I have not read his first book, A Walk Across America, and, frankly, I do not care to because he very much came across as an entitled jackass that shirked his parenting responsibilities to galavant around Alaska while his wife took care of their daughter, especially in the dead of winter. If the first is anything like the second, I'd rather not waste my time reading anymore from him. Also, every instance where he talked about his daughter Rebekah being around young men or being attractive came off as extremely creepy, controlling, and gross, and that may be the #metoo movement influencing how I viewed this book from 2001. Either way, read a different memoir about Alaska because this one was Bad.

Looking for Alaska

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