Lynn SchoolerCritiques

Excellent account of a guy walking in the wilderness of Alaska. including his terrifying experience of meeting a bear

Very nice for a first book. The descriptive writing brought Alaska alive. This is ultimately a book about friendship, discovery, and loss. The vehicle for these themes is the natural world and the human interaction portrayed. I especially enjoyed the passages describing whales - their feeding, communication, and their general behaviors.

Parts of this book are very sad and immersed the reader in the authors loss of family & friends.½

1 of a trilogy on Alaska

This was recommended to me by a book seller in Ketchikan when I asked about local literature. The story is interesting and Lynn presents an accurate picture of Alaskan life. I do wish that he were a little better writer.
Lynn Schooler lives in Juneau and earns his living as a guide to Alaskan wild places. He's a guy with rough edges: a loner, whose spine is twisted by scoliosis. THe book chronicles his friendship with Michio Hoshino a wildlife photographer from Japan. In contrast to the author, Michio is a warm and open person who makes friends easily.
Together, Lynn and Michio search for the rare blue bear in remote Alaska. This gives an opportunity to explore the natural history and Alaskan history and culture. Lynn is very knowledgable and it's a fascinating subject.
Sadly, Michio was killed in a bear attack while on a photo shoot in Russia. The book gives a review of the risks and rewards of wilderness activities.½

50-something bloke facing the break-up of his marriage goes for long walk in Alaska. I found it difficult to get into at the beginning, but then got hooked. Liked the way the story of the hike is interwoven with Alaskan history/geology, of which I knew pretty much nothing. The description of the July 9, 1958 earthquake/tsunami in Lituya Bay is gripping. Schooler describes it as 'the largest mega-tsunami ever recorded on the planet'. Other highlights include the story of the hermit Jim Huscroft who lived on Cenotaph Island, a turn-of-the century outback murder mystery, and a frantic escape from a grizzly bear.

This memoir is about a recent wilderness journey along the coastline of Alaska. Experienced outback guide, Lynn Schooler is overly focused on his advancing age and corresponding loss of physical strength and abilities plus stressed out from working to construct a rural house. What was once planned to be he and his recent bride's retreat, the home that would last past their lifetimes, has now become a physical drain. Schooler recognizes his wife's increased distraction and loss of interest as she concentrates more on her career in the city. A long-time neighbor and close friend suffers through cancer and dies. He and his wife drift further apart and find less and less in common.

Schooler halts his building work, and takes off on a long-planned hazardous journey, traveling solo first by boat and then hiking as Springtime arrives. The trip reconnects him to wonders of Alaska coastal landforms and nature. He encounters a half-starved, crazed grizzly bear that stalks his trail and threatens. He endures freezing surf and water, days of rain, reduced food rations, and physical aches and pain as he adjusts to lost relationships. Momentarily he is able to make the bear retreat using up his flare gun charges and resorts to yelling and throwing rocks. Temporarily this does run the bear away, but the brute relentlessly returns. Schooler comes to a flooded stream, rushing with snowmelt waters that has to be crossed. He needs to figure out a way to escape. This true story does a great job of connecting nature with Alaskan history interwoven with the author's personal journey. (lj)

En fantastisk smuk bog om vildmarken og naturen og om forfatterens venskab med en japansk fotograf. Jeg blev nødt til at prøve at skaffe bøger med den japanske fotografs billeder, men så vidt jeg husker, lykkedes det mig kun at få fat i en enkelt.
Jeg læste bogen på dansk, hvor den hedder Den blå bjørn (glimrende oversættelse ;-), men har lagt den engelske ind for at få billedet med på min widget.

En fantastisk smuk bog om vildmarken og naturen og om venskaber

Through his life as a guide, Lynn Schooler offers to the reader an exceptional tour in Alaska. A state where nature is still the absolute master.
His work will lead him to meet the famous photographer Michio Hoshino. A true friendship is to be born between them. They will meet regularly for ten years. Each meeting will be one more step to the discovery of the wild region of Alaska and the beginning of an almost impossible quest : the one of the Blue Bear. This search will last for years.
But more than this particular quest, this book is a photo album where pictures are words that transport you to the end of the world ...
This is a wonderful journey in Alaska that I advise you to read just for the pleasure of it ...

Despite some interesting scientific aspects, that I bearly understood, The Blue Bear shows life and how important it is

To be consume without moderation.

The Last Shot
The Incredible Story of the C.S.S. Shenandoah and the True Conclusion of the American Civil War— written by Lynn Schooler
Comment and review by James Tate, Jr.

Lynn Schooler, the reclusive author of the moving personal story, The Blue Bear, has written an historic account of the last days of the Civil War and provided interesting insight into the effects of the conflict on many things: the last days of the great slaughter of whales, international maritime law, and the balance of power on the high seas. But is his first historic work up to the standards of an academic treatise, or is it just an entertaining narrative?

Early on in the conflict between America’s North and South, Confederate agents had taken the dispute onto the World stage. Southern sympathizers quickly contracted in England for thousands of three-band Enfields, the workhorse cap and ball muzzle-loading rifle used in the South until Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson took the Union rifle works from Harpers Ferry and moved them to Richmond. When Union agents arrived in England, they found the available production of Enfield rifles had largely been taken up by the South.

By the autumn of 1864, the Confederacy had experienced some success on the battlefields at home, and the fast and deadly Confederate raiders Alabama and Florida had disrupted American shipping and commerce throughout the Atlantic. Enter the Shenandoah, the subject of this tale, which was also obtained through the efforts of Confederate agents in England.

The Shenandoah was built as a trade vessel in England under the name Sea King. After she was launched, she met under cover of night with a smaller cargo ship outside of British waters where she was supplied with armaments and outfitted as a raider of American shipping and whaling.
The Shenandoah was under orders to "seek out and utterly destroy" the whaling fleets of New England as part of an effort to bleed the Union of its economic strength. At this task the Shenandoah was very effective, despite being poorly built, short crewed, under armed, and under provisioned. In a circumnavigation of the world, she captured more than a thousand prisoners, captured or sank thirty-eight ships and evaded the best the Union Navy had to offer.
The episode described in The Last Shot details the assault by the Shenandoah on the whaling fleet in Alaskan waters that culminated on June 22, 1865, the longest day of the year, and nearly three months after General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse. Although other Confederate units continued to fight after Lee signed the papers in April, none continued the fight as long as this single ship in the Bering Sea.
The Shenandoah’s Captain, James Waddell, overcame great obstacles (including a improperly made bearing on his ship’s screw) to sail and steam from England through Melbourne, Australia to the Pacific whaling grounds and as far North as the edge of the sea ice in the Bering Sea. He was so successful that he even contemplated taking San Francisco for the Confederacy when he was devastated to learn that the war was over and that his recent actions would be viewed by many as nothing more than piracy on the high seas.
With a distressed and potentially rebellious crew, many of whom he had commissioned from his victims’ ships, he returned to Liverpool, and ultimate freedom, by navigating over twenty thousand miles in 122 days, never within sight of land.
The author, Lynn Schooler, lives and writes in a small cabin in Alaska, sometimes working as a commercial fisherman, shipwright, professional seaman, wildlife photographer, and guide. His knowledge of ships, the sea, and the harsh life at the edges of civilization comes from personal experience and contributes greatly to the feeling of authenticity of the story he tells in The Last Shot.
The Last Shot is a good rousing tale, likely to appeal to the multitude of Civil War enthusiasts in the United States as well as Australia, Germany, and England among the settings where this largely forgotten tale plays out. Sea Story fans of Patrick O’Brien and C. S. Forester will find Schooler’s tale authentic and engaging. It is based on a factual history researched from original sources.

But, to return to the question at the beginning of this review, when it comes time to draw conclusions from the historic accounts, the reader is left with a feeling of incompleteness. While it is evident the author used original journals and contemporary accounts for his sources, there is no literature cited, no index and no footnoting of source material. The footnoting that is present is casual, unsophisticated and not necessarily relevant to the historic context of the story.

All in all, this is a good book, an interesting read about an historic incident, but not up to academic standards as a history thesis.