Alaska Behind Blue Eyes

Tragedy met two Seattle bankers kayaking in Prince William Sound in Southcentral Alaska. One of the men was killed by falling ice while the other video-taped the event. The banker was the one charged with managing the Alaska Account at SeaFirst Bank in Seattle. Aliana Pedersen, Assistant Director of Finance for the State of Alaska, must now find a replacement. Shortly after the change-over a clerk in the bank discovered irregularities in the account. Trooper Reuben Hayes had become acquainted with all the parties when the first banker was accidentally killed. His investigation leads him to a personal affair with the Deputy Director of Finance and embroils him in a case of bank fraud. Reminiscent of Alaska’s Last Bridge to Nowhere politics, the suspected perpetrators are the bank president, the head of the Alaska Account at SeaFirst, and even the Governor of the State of Alaska. Many others become entangled in the case: a local drug dealer, a Mexican Mafia Don, and the FBI. An Alaska who-done-it that lasts through the final page.

Early one evening, I was patrolling alone and decided to stop a vehicle with its taillight out. I had no way of knowing that this seemingly routine decision would lead to a strange twist of fate years later... These true, first-hand accounts from law enforcement officials across the nation reveal how intuition, apparitions, UFOs, prophetic dreams, and other forces beyond our understanding have impacted them in the course of duty. The weird and unexplained experiences in this book take place in the midst of the death-defying gun battles, thrilling rescues, and heart-searing tragedies that police officers face every day—and reveal the fascinating inner lives of the heroic men and women behind the badge.

A pair of siblings escapes—along with a Siberian Husky—the strictures of their 1950s industrial Ohio town on the adventure of a lifetime. Talented high-school senior Donna Lane yearns to leave her Midwestern home in pursuit of a career in design, but she feels obligated to stay and care for her helpless father and her younger brother, Will. In fragile health and obsessed with the television show Sergeant Striker and the Alaskan Wild, Will’s dearest companion is a mute Siberian Husky named Trusty. The arrival of two outsiders inspires Donna to consider her dreams anew. Then Will falls sick, and Donna packs up their yellow convertible—with Will, Trusty, and a road atlas—and sets off for the Alaskan Territory. A portrait of a singular American moment, My One Square Inch of Alaska is a moving tale of exploration and love—human and canine—that dares to believe the impossible.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).