Land of Bear and Eagle - by Tanyo Ravicz (Paperback)

About the Book

At odds with society, Ravicz persuades his wife, to join him in a reset, a new beginning. Before long, they and their children are living in a wilderness cabin on Alaska's Kodiak Island, outnumbered by the brown bears.

From the Back Cover

At loose ends in his private life, at odds with society, Tanyo Ravicz persuades Martina, his wife, to join him in a reset, a new beginning. Before long, they and their children are living in a wilderness cabin on Alaska's Kodiak Island, outnumbered by the brown bears.

A celebration of nature and of the peculiarities of the Alaskan bush, Land of Bear and Eagle: A Home in the Kodiak Wilderness builds from personal experience to a rounded, loving portrait of a place, Cottonwood Homestead, and a way of life. In these essays and sketches, by turns humorous, meditative and lyrical, the author goes beyond the challenges and triumphs of wilderness living to explore his environment and to examine the relationships among the plants and animals and the people he meets. Along the way, he wrestles with his doubts and reconsiders his assumptions about life.

The testament of one of Alaska's last homesteaders, this book offers a vision of what it means to be wedded to a place and fully alive to the world.

Review Quotes

"A disenchanted truth seeker in his youth, Tanyo Ravicz with his young family, eschewed lives of quiet desperation by settling a hard heaven of 16 acres accessible only by sea or by air. In language unflinchingly honest, graceful, precise, tender, flashing with humor, and sounding Thoreauvian notes, Land of Bear and Eagle offers a kaleidoscope of seasonal reflections and observations. Treading lightly, fully aware on the land, Ravicz met deer "masters of the quiet" and eagles with "the imperial disdain of centurions." Where lesser writers employ a journal's chronology, he has assembled topical essays in a structure that deepens our understanding of decades of returning to Cottonwood Homestead, sojourns that bestowed on this indweller a profound, long-term perspective. This collection derives its freshness and poignancy from the author's frequent skipping between worlds: an urban, mainland or even Californian one and a wild insular one where the world's largest brown bears outnumber and mingle with people and the nearest phone was a five-mile boat ride away. Ravicz' memories cut to the core of the Alaska experience--not since John Haines has this state's literature seen a homesteading poet like him."

-- Michael engelhard, author of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon and Where the Rain Children Sleep: A Sacred Geography of the Colorado Plateau

About the Author