Alan Rafferty
Of All the Gin Joints in All the World
Rowing to Alaska and Other True Stories
By Wayne McLennan
Granta Books 239pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
The story of Wayne McLennan's primitive voyage to America's most northerly state begins, as do most of the stories in this fascinating book, in a bar. An elderly drifter tells him, and anyone else prepared to listen, about the Alaskan gold rush, and about how the poorest prospectors were forced to make the journey from Washington State up the coast to Skagway, from where they could gain access to the gold fields, by rowing, because they couldn't afford passage on a sailboat. The unspeakably arduous trip takes two and a half months. McLennan and his friend Doug make up their minds instantly. They move to Seattle, endure the very worst jobs available to gather funds, and commission a shortsighted old man to hand-build them a 22-foot 'Grand Banks dory' - a rowboat they will soon call home.
This haphazard but extraordinarily determined approach to decision-making is typical of McLennan. He will later set off to become a gold miner in Costa Rica on the basis of an article in National Geographic - 'I read that it was a democracy, that it had no army, that the girls
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
On the night of 5th July 1809, a group of soldiers kidnapped Pope Pius VII on the orders of Napoleon Bonaparte. Munro Price looks at what happened next.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bonaparte-meets-his-match
'She lived in a damp basement with her mother and sister, smoking roll-ups and talking to her parrot.'
Joanna Kavenna traces the life of the 'almost-forgotten poet' Charlotte Mew.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-hated-poetry-readings
'If, as James Wolcott once claimed, Roth was a miracle of modern medicine, he was also one of therapy’s notable failures.'
@leorobsonwriter on Philip Roth, that 'walking, wanking paradox'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-great-american-novelist