THE STORY OF ALASKA

Another volume in a series that has seemed to me consistently contradictory in appearance and in text matter. In format, the books look like picture books. There is a full page picture by C. H. De Witt, reproduced in colored lithography, opposite every page of text. Each text page takes up some aspect of the subject (in this case Alaska), and the facts are presented succinctly, but with very little dramatic or pictorial sense. Northern lights, glaciers, gold and other metals, logging, salmon fishing, hunting and trapping -- bit by bit the geographic and physiographic facts, the occupational facts emerge. And yet, somehow, the book seems to me to miss fire.