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Tom Kizzia traveled widely in rural Alaska during a 25-year career as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. He is the author of the bestseller Pilgrim's Wilderness, chosen by the New York Times as the best true crime book set in Alaska, and the Native village travel narrative, The Wake of the Unseen Object, now re-issued in the Alaska classics series of the University of Alaska Press. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017. He received an Artist Fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. A graduate of Hampshire College, he lives in Homer, Alaska.
A beautifully written story about the sometimes difficult but almost always generous people who made their lives amidst the wilderness . . . Kizzia tells of their struggles with the land, with each other, and with themselves. Harder to avoid were the outside forces . . . Kizzia, a masterful writer, delivers one beautiful sentence after another. This is a beautiful book. - David James, Anchorage Daily News It is impossible to choose one book to represent Alaska because our state is so varied. There are rainforests and the Arctic tundra, tiny villages and cities, and over 100 languages spoken, from Ahtna to Zulu. But Cold Mountain Path is a good place to start. It's an excellent history of McCarthy, Alaska, in the 20th century. McCarthy was home to a world-class copper mine. After the mines closed in 1938, all sorts of characters remained, and more arrived in the following decades, creating a kind of only-in-Alaska community. This is a story about the Alaska that we once were and that I think many of us feel we are losing. - National Public Radio, Books for Travelers Summer 2022. Nominated by Alaska State Writer Laureate Heather Lende Chosen by National Public Radio as essential reading for anyone traveling to Alaska, Kizzia's lively, often humorous historical account of the remote copper mining town of McCarthy tucked beneath the Wrangell Mountains will astound you with its descriptions of bush country life in Alaska from 1938 to 1982. A book that begins and ends with the effects of a mass murder in a remote small town. Thrilling reading. - Richard Chiappone, author of The Hunger of Crows It is also an environmental history, one that without ever belaboring the point examines how people come to value land and place, and how contestations over that value remain at the core of Alaskan-and American-social life . . . Cold Mountain Path is, for readers in the lower 48, both an introduction to a particularly Alaskan place and a story that situates Alaska in broad themes of the American 20th century: the relationship to land and ownership, the tensions between individualism and community, our relationship with government near and far, our hopes for the future and knowledge of the past. All of this is situated in a place that changes as dynamically as its people, told with great care and in the restrained poetry of Kizzia's prose. - Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait The story spans an arc as grand as the landscape surrounding McCarthy, with characters equally magnificent. - Michael Armstrong, Homer News The vivid descriptions of some of these folks, their ingenuity and their pranks, will have some readers laughing. - Margaret Bauman, The Cordova Times It's a story of paradoxes and contradictions, of human settlement and wilderness, and of the challenges involved in navigating multiple truths. - Vivian Wagner
