Holger JorgensenCritiques

A very fun read, especially for anyone interested in either the state of Alaska or in aviation, especially the history of aviation "on the frontier" such as it was. This is anything but a typical, dry biography, nor is it the type of Alaska Bush Pilot narrative that became popular in the 1980s and 1990s, that focused entirely on the stories in the cockpit and mentioned nothing of the rest of the world. While it certainly does discuss aviation, and Jorgy's life in the skies, it also spends time addressing the history of Alaska, the difficulties of growing up there in the 1940's and 1950's, the challenges and prejudices of being a Native Alaskan at that time, especially in a field like aviation, and more. The stories are touching and for the most part interesting, both to pilots and non-pilots alike, and the book tends to be a quick read. However what it lacks is structure - it feels like a series of interviews more than a single, continuous narrative, and the threads connecting all of those stories can be tenuous (at best) sometimes. Overall if you can handle the challenge posed by the lack of a traditional biographical structure it is a good, mostly fun read.

One of the jobs I wanted to work at when I was younger was to be a Lighthouse Keeper, the other was to be a bush pilot. Never got to be either of them, but in Jorgy I get to at least read about what it would have been like to be a pilot in the wilds of alaska and canada. I have read a number of narratives like this, but I think this is one of the best. Captured therein is a sense of time and place that no one else but an experienced pilot of 85,000 hours of flight time could do. His time in the air extended from 1943 to 2001...an amazing accomplishment in my eyes...and in many a pilots experience. Reading Jorgy is a pleasure for me, his writing is like his flights...no fuss, no muss, quick and to the point. A great read!!

A very interesting biography. While other Alaskan pilot biographies focus just on flying adventures, this one presents just as fully a history of aviation and a history of Alaska. There are loads of photos as well: cultural, historical, and aeronautical.

The tone and style of this book, which is pretty laid back, belies the risks Holger "Jorgy" Jorgensen took as he pursued a career in aviation in Alaska spanning approximately 55 years. It also chronicles what it was like to grow up a native Alaskan at a time when prejudice against them meant their lives, which were already difficult, was made even more so.

Jorgy had a lot of moxie and was extremely bright, traits which come through in reading his story. Reading this book is more like listening to an old Alaska hand tell stories, and boy did he have stories.

After reading this book, I can imagine what it was like to take off from an airfield, into a low ceiling, climb out above the clouds and flying with just a radio signal for navigation to a lonely airport, having to drop back down through the clouds and rely on flaming 55 gallon oil drums to help you find the runway. His stories relate numerous adventures like this over his long flying career and what is amazing is that he lived to tell about them. Pilots, used to flying in the lower 48 with all kinds of navigational aids including GPS will, I think, find this book especially amazing and entertaining.

Some have commented this book is a little too laid back for them. But I think, if you're interested at all in aviation, Alaska, or especially the combination, you can think of reading this book as sitting down on a cold night next to a pot-bellied stove and listening to a gifted raconteur rattle off one story after another; if that appeals to you, I think you'll really like this book.

A fun read, but certainly not a traditional biography. If you are looking for a straight storyline with a clear start and end, you may be in for a surprise if you pick up this book. In general, this book is pieced together by segments and articles, as if the author is developing a portrait of a person instead of a life story told in the tradional, narrative storyline. With that said, the life of Jorgy is interesting, and this book is worth a look.½

This was a book I really wanted to like. There were fascinating stories, a fantastic setting, a world changing and a colorful character. It just did not come together like I thought it could.
Jorgy is clearly a character....a man who accomplished a great deal and from whom one can learn a lot about persistence, high standards and energy. He is not humble and is only marginally likable, but he is an impressive man nonetheless.

His book, however, is not as impressive. It reads like a series of short magazine segments and the staccato style of the first-person storytelling makes for a tiresome read at times. The reader wants a coherent story line, but none forms and it ends up being just a series of episodes sewn together only lightly.

I am glad I read it as I have a view into life in Alaska and how it has changed over the past half of a century. I am also glad I am finished.

As posted on http://www.truffin.com

In the late 60's my grandfather purchased an 8mm film camera complete with light bar. It was a hand-wound model that would only capture a minute or two of action before needing to be rewound. The movies he captured from that era featured select highlights: children crawling on the ground, adults gesticulating towards children to get them to crawl, birthday cakes being extinguished. The special moments were carefully selected and shaped. Watching them now is entertaining and effectively allows us to expand our memories.

In the 80's my grandfather acquired a videotape camcorder. The inexpensive recording medium and lack of any processing time or fees meant that we could record every moment of every family event. And we did. A tripod was set up in the dining room so that whole family dinners could be recorded in their entirety; each and every Christmas present was unwrapped for the camera in slow succession. Watching these tapes now is an exercise in endurance. The lack of any selection or shapliness to the events reveals the banality of the majority of our conversation. Comments and remembrances that had us laughing till we cried or fondly remembering other family events are buried in the lengthy stretches of passing carrots and explaining mundane daily business. The documentarian of the past, sifting through the sands of the creek to find nuggets of gold, was replaced by an undiscerning strip mine.

Such is the effect of _Jorgy: The Life of Native American Bush Pilot and Airline Captain Holger "Jorgy" Jorgensen_. The book reads as though Jean Lester, the "as told to" author, merely transcribed hours of interview tapes with Jorgy Jorgensen. Events are repeated, fascinating side-stories are introduced and abandoned without care, rabbit-trails are followed at whim, and even seemingly unrelated political ramblings are included with little context or thoughtful development.

The shame of it is that the life of Jorgy Jorgensen appears to have been an interesting and important one. Here is a man who spent his early years subsisting in a mining village on the Alaskan frontier. After just an 8th-grade education, he stepped into the early years of Alaska aviation, helping to build important airstrips and learning to fly. Jorgensen had a front seat in watching the development of the Alaska oil and air industries. Had Lester collated the interviews and given them some kind of narrative shape, even as little as ironing out the temporal wrinkles that often appear when we tell stories about our lives, the events of Jorgensen's life could have presented a compelling narrative of the history of aviation, Alaska, and the life of native peoples in the frozen wastes. As it stands, the considerable power and romance of the story is lost.

I still find myself wanting to go back and watch the old 8mm films my grandfather made, but I cannot remember a single fleeting desire to sit through a recorded family dinner. For dogged researchers interested in the facts of the area and period, the book will stand as a solid record of one man's experience of Alaskan aviation. However, a solid record does not make a compelling biography.

This book is an oral autobiography, so I suspended my usual demands on structure and approached the stories in this book as if I were a small child listening grownups talk about days gone by. And I was well rewarded.

The subject of this book is Holger “Jorgy” Jorgensen, whose heritage includes Russian, Inupiat, and Norwegian ancestors. His life began with a subsistence-level struggle for survival and grew to be part of the story of aviation in Alaska. In 1943, at age sixteen, Jorgy started flying lessons and he never looked back. He flew as a charter pilot, an airline pilot, a freight pilot, and for the sheer love of flying itself. He criss-crossed Alaska, landing on icebergs, too-short runways, and runways ending beside mountains. He progressed to flying jets and piloted planes carrying passengers and freight around the world.

I can see how Jean Lester, who brought this book to life, must have sometimes wanted to beat her head against the wall. She describes Jorgy as a master of understatement, and editor Carla Helfferich describes him as “a laconic fellow with a good memory and no interest in tooting his own horn.” The stories are told in a dry, unemphatic way just as I might talk about a day at the office. However, Jorgy's day at the office included hauling the inanimate (dynamite and dump trucks) and animate (fish--dead, reindeer--live). And he did it in a place where you might have to drain the oil from an airplane's engine to keep it from freezing.

The problem with reviewing this book is that I want to tell you all the things Jorgy did, and there are just too many of them. And then there are the very understated descriptions of what it was like to grow up as a native and have to catch or harvest every bite of food that went into your mouth. Plus there is the story (also understated) of how Jorgy faced down the attitudes toward natives and did his part to end segregation in Alaska.

The natural audience for this book is pilots, but non-pilots will find a lot here, too. I'm not a pilot and I found much about this book to be fascinating. I only wish I could have really been listening while Jorgy told his stories.

I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers program on LibraryThing.

Otherwise, to be honest, I probably would have never even come across it, let alone bought it.

And yet, I started this book on May 8 and finished it on May 12. It was certainly not a chore to read.

The book is very earnest, if a bit amateurish. Told as a series of anecdotes, it reads like a book of short stories with a common theme.

Jorgy Jorgensen is definitely a remarkable individual who overcame long odds to rise to a well respected position in his chosen profession. The book conveys his laconic voice well although, to some extent, it is a victim of his accomplishments in that, even when Jorgy's not bragging, the book seems to be.

The book holds obvious appeal for fans of aviation and those interested in the behind the scenes stories of the Alaska bush. While I am neither of those, the book held my interest quite well too.

From Jean Lester's website:

This book is the autobiography of an Inupiat man, born in an isolated mining community, having only an eighth-grade education, who amidst a frontier mentality of conqueror superiority, surpassed the prejudice of his time to become a legendary aviator. Early aviation, the Alaska Territorial Guard, segregation, the DEW line, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline were part of this exciting and tumultuous time in Alaska's history. Boom and bust, exploration and exploitation to such an extent no one could have imagined or anticipated, was Alaska when Jorgy was growing up and flying. Jean Lester brings her talent for capturing the voices of her subjects to bear, vividly relaying Holger "Jorgy" Jorgensen's wry and laconic tales of his life in the northern air.½

Holger "Jorgy" Jorgensen was a bright, proud man who rose from his roots as the half-Native child raised in pre-WWII Alaska to piloting jetliners in threatening terrain and weather. The stories of life-skills acquisition in childhood are fascinating as are his struggles to push past ethnic and educational discrimination. But the repetitive nature of themes and chest-thumping get a bit wearying. This is a book that should have stayed in the oral history realm. I do recommend it for those with an interest in Alaskan and early aviation history.

This is the memoir of a native [actually half native] Alaskan pilot. What comes across most strongly is his disdain of bureaucrats and other non-fliers. Some of the stories involving racism in Alaska were quite interesting. He certainly doesn't mince his words. Typical for autobiographies of this type are various stories of flying near disasters.

The book is really let down by some editorial decisions. According to the introduction this was based on oral history interviews. Apparently the tapes were just transcribed there doesn't appear to have been any editing. So there are occasional asides that could have been easily cleaned up. The chapters also seem to be somewhat random. They jump all over his career. They're not even thematic as far as I can tell.

Sadly not recommended there's a good story here but it's buried.

I asked for this book because I really like to read accounts of earlier, pioneer living - I guess it goes back to reading Little House in the Woods when I was seven. As a result, the earlier chapters of this book, chronicling Jorgy's life growing up before he became a pilot were much more interesting to me than the later chapters, which dealt with Jorgy's aviation career.
Jorgy was born in 1927, and his father died when he was seven, leaving his mother, an Inupiat native, a widow with half a dozen children at a time when living in a little bush village was much harder than it is today. He recounts how they fished and hunted for food, and of course how they gathered wood, with Jorgy running the dog sled from a very early age. There is a great picture of Jorgy, age 10, in a cowboy suit he bought from Sears with money he earned himself hauling ice. It illustrates both how hard he had to work at an early age, and that he still knew how to enjoy himself.
I have to confess I lost interest in the latter part of the book, because aviation history is not a passion of mine. But even to me it was interesting to see his career progress from flying small Cessnas to flying DC-3s. His career ran from a time when it was impossible to telephone from one airfield to another, to check the weather, to the the time he recounts of calling Alaska from a plane while flying from NY to Boston, just for the novelty of it.
The book is very well illustrated with photos, which should interest any reader.
(By the way - the book is an "as told to" book, and reads like there was no editing of his anecdotes other than placing them in a logical order. Some readers may be turned off by the repetition that an editor might have removed. Others will be charmed by the narration in Jorgy's own voice)

I was very pleased with this book. The cover is attractive and the size of the book is comfortable, as well as allowing the print to be comfortably readable. It included a great map illustration which made Jorgy’s travels come alive. Many photos, interesting captions and quotes from those who knew him, as well as an informative glossary and appendix made for a fuller picture of this man’s life. Having interviewed the elderly to try to write their memories down, I know how difficult it can be to get them to talk about themselves, that is why the notes from those who worked with and knew Holger Jorgensen are so helpful. Jean Lester did a good job of capturing Jorgy’s calm, dry, no-nonsense style of speaking and his quiet humor.

Aviation fans would probably enjoy this book even more than I did; it is filled with details of the flights and planes used in the bush of Alaska in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. It also tells much of the life of survival in Alaska villages in those years. There are many interesting anecdotes which made it an easy read. Holger faced and overcame tragedy, prejudice and hardship. He quietly, or not so quietly, did what was right and did his best. It is uplifting to read about such a man, and I felt by the end of this book that I had met a fine specimen of the human race.

I sailed through this thoroughly enjoyable and well-told story of the life of native Alaskan bush pilot Holger Jorgensen, as told to Jean Lester. His description of Alaska and village life when he was growing up in the 1930s and 40s is fascinating by itself. Jorgensen describes his ascent through the ranks as a pilot, along with the discrimination he faced as a native. He also tells how the training, guidance and equal treatment he received from those who saw him only as a pilot - not a native pilot - helped him to achieve his goal to be the best pilot he could. I found the descriptions of flights, airports (or sometimes just spots to land) and piloting strategies and techniques to be particularly instructive, even if I never fly in Alaska. This is a handsome book, with photographs and a nice format.