Innocent In Alaska

Innocent in Alaska, first published in 1963 recounts the lively adventures of a young woman telephone operator, age 18, who left her family's farm in Nebraska to brave the wilds of Alaska in 1904. She describes life in the small cities of Alaska (especially in Fairbanks and Nome), in the rural areas, and her sometimes hazardous travels by land and sea. Also portrayed are her romances with Jack Bartlett, a handsome yet violent-tempered lawyer, and with Will Burke, whom she would eventually marry. Along the way Margaret Burke would parlay her modest earnings into a small fortune, a fitting testament to this courageous woman.

If you close your eyes and think about Alaska, what do you see? Eskimos and igloos? Mountains of snow? Polar bears and icebergs? Do you know that not all Alaskan natives are Eskimos? There are many different tribes of native peoples. Each has its own language and way of life. Many of these native peoples have been Orthodox Christians for over two hundred years. This is largely due to the missionary efforts of one man, St. Innocent of Alaska. He converted and baptized thousands of people into the Christian faith. He was a wonderful and godly man who lived a missionary life full of adventures that you would never dream of! Many people think that he is the greatest Christian missionary of all time!

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. This is the unforgettable story of how Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die. "It may be nonfiction, but Into the Wild is a mystery of the highest order." —Entertainment Weekly McCandess had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Not long after, he was dead. Into the Wild is the mesmerizing, heartbreaking tale of an enigmatic young man who goes missing in the wild and whose story captured the world’s attention. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild. Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless. When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding—and not an ounce of sentimentality. Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.

Originally published in the Aleut (Eskimo) language in 1833, this book is a simple yet challenging introduction to Christianity from one of the greatest teachers of the Russian Orthodox Church: sainted Russian Bishop and missionary Innocent Veniaminov. Timeless and universal, this updated edition--which includes a new section entitled "Points for Reflection" at the end of each chapter--discusses what it means to know God and have a relationship with Jesus. It will appeal to those seeking to understand their own faith more fully.

The shocking true crime story of an Alaskan college student’s murder and her mother’s relentless crusade for the truth. When police told Karen Foster that her eighteen-year-old daughter, Bonnie Craig, had died in a hiking accident, she knew the pieces of the investigation just didn’t add up. Bonnie would have never ditched her classes at the University of Alaska to go hiking. And she didn’t drive—so how would she have reached McHugh Creek, miles outside of Anchorage, in the first place? Armed with little more than her own conviction, Karen set out to find the truth behind her daughter’s death. After a long series of false leads and dead ends, it seemed the case would forever go unsolved. Then, after twelve years of public campaigning, private despair, and increasingly tense dealings with the detectives working the case, Karen received an e-mail that would change everything: the system, at long last, had produced a match for the unknown DNA in the case—from a man in a jail all the way across the country. Here is the chilling tale of a mother’s unflagging fight to track down the monster who stole her daughter’s life—and the battle to ensure that he, and others like him, would no longer be able to evade justice. INCLUDES PHOTOS

A collection of documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries documenting how Orthodox priests and lay Russians converted the Aleutian people of Kodiak Island and in the Yukon Delta in Alaska. Demonstrates how the Christians correlated traditional Orthodox Christian doctrine with the beliefs of the Alaska Natives.