As Marie tracks the mysteries behind Nora's tangled life, she is forced time and again to decide what matters in a life story, what is the right story to tell, and whose story is the one that is true. At the same time she is deeply involved in mysteries about her own life and missing her long estranged brother and completing a philosophy of science paper she has been working on for fifteen years, ever since she left graduate school.

Basically, Marie is a bit of a hot mess in several ways, but a very smart mess who realizes she is at a personal fork in the road that Nora Mars has just happened to drop down into through virtue of her impending death.

None of this sounds like a lot to make a book around and yet again (this is the second time I've read it), I really enjoyed the heck out of The Center of Things. There is a lot of old movie trivia (which I love) and a lot of general science talk (also love) and time spent in a library, natural history museum, Impala convertible, and at a desk, writing furiously. There is also a family mystery which never gets old, some investigative reporting (shades of Lois Lane!) and the brainiest romance I have ever come across in fiction.

Find a copy if you can, this one is a treat.

We're through February so here's a belated look at how I did keeping my work resolutions for the year.

1. Reviewed two books for Booklist, one on the Iraq War and one on how income inequality in the U.S. affects children. This was a slower month but after January (where I reviewed 8), it was welcome.

2. No books read for Locus, but did submit the list for the next several months, made several requests and received a couple of books.

3. Six articles in the Bush Pilot blog including one on winter survival that generated some angry comments but is something I'm rather proud of.

4. The essay I submitted was rejected with a form letter response. I think there is another way to write it that would improve it and I think I got too personal. I'm not crushed by this rejection at all; mostly I'm just happy that I wrote it and submitted it all in one month.

5. I wrote a piece on a science series for teens that I've been trying to place. I sent out some queries to lit sites that have gotten me nowhere (I wrote about this last week), so now I'm trying to send it out to science sites which might end up being a much better fit anyway.

6. Conducted a couple of interviews I needed to do for some Alaska work and sent out a list of questions for some other pieces I have planned. All of that is in the works this month.

7. Did a ton of research on places to submit too. In a lot of ways this is the toughest part of writing (maybe even harder than writing itself). Now I know what I'm writing and where I'm sending out to (first try, second try, third try), which makes me feel like I'm in a lot more control of my writing life.

February was okay for me. I didn't make a big strides forward, but didn't fall back either. One lapse was my failure to get the Alaskan profile done that I planned to write. I don't know how I failed on that one. March has been better - I'm only halfway through but I think it's going to be a more successful month for me which is important.

Now, I just need to get my photo albums back on track......

"Oh, we don't run any teen book reviews," she replied. "Our readers aren't interested in those books. You can always submit to our general site email though and take a chance. Thanks for stopping by!"

And then she turned her back and starting speaking to someone else and I realized I was having one of those moments where someone dismisses you in a way that is acceptably rude but certainly feels lousy.

In the months after that interaction, I spent some time looking for lit sites that might be open to new YA submissions. I was picked up by LARB for a piece last fall and am now doing regular reviews for Locus (in print). Last month I finished a piece I've been wanting to write for a while about a YA series of NF science books though and emailed a query letter to another big lit site. The response was very polite, the editor was actually interested in the books for his kids, but again I was told that their readers are not interested in "these kinds of books". And that's when I got serious about seeing just what kind of books lit sites are reviewing.

There have been a zillion articles written about whether or not adults read YA; enough of them that I don't need to tackle that subject again. One thing no one does dispute is that people who visit lit sites are book readers and book lovers and while there have been no big surveys about whether or not these folks have children, I think it is safe to assume that a decent sized segment of the reading population are in fact parents and probably inclined to buy books for their kids.

I don't think I'm going far out on a limb when I suggest that perhaps these parents might want to know about a great book every now and again that might be enjoyed by their kids (or their nieces, nephews, cousins, godchildren or other young people in their lives). The assumption that appears to be widely made by the lit sites however is that their readers would prefer to find those type of book reviews (and the books themselves) elsewhere. I have no idea why they have come to this conclusion.

I suppose some site administrators do survey the specific post stats and can say that a YA book review receives fewer visitors than a comparable adult literary review. But honestly, that kind of analysis doesn't really impress me much as a reader. Stats can be driven by so many strange things (like controversy) and quantity does not necessarily mean quality.

In other words, 1,000 people might blow through a post, not read past the first few paragraphs and never think of the book again while 200 readers might read another post and all go out and buy the book or check it out from the library or mention it on social media. It's really tough to quantify the value of one visitor over another.

None of that is the point though as I don't think that potential stats are what drive the decision for lit sites to pass on YA book reviews. I think it is a lot more about not wanting to be perceived as a teen site or be associated with people who read or want or care about teen books. Lit sites want to be about certain books and the people who they think read those and all the rest, well, those are books for other kinds of readers.

Yeah, this is that dismissive part again.

While I am not a fan of casting a derisive eye on genre reading either, (I love a good fantasy, mystery or romance as much as anyone), the refusal to include at least occasional YA book reviews seems particularly shortsighted to me. It smacks of superiority, of more of that "serious readers vs everybody else" attitude that seems to lurk at the corners of far too many online literary conversations. It's like standing in a room with people who claim they were reading Dostoyevsky at age 12 as opposed to the likes of Harry Potter.

I never believe those people. (And honestly if it's true, it's deeply strange.)

The other day my 13 year old son finished reading the two Lockwood & Co. books by Jonathan Stroud and raved about them, insisting I give them a shot. I read both books, enjoyed the heck out of them, (great characters, wonderful world building, just the right dose of creepy mystery), and promptly emailed a cousin to suggest them for his son. I also made a note to buy them for my niece in a couple of years (she's a little young) and will be mentioning them to a sister-in-law for my nephew to read.

My son accomplished with his review exactly what lit sites are supposed to be about--to share good books with as many potential readers as possible. I'm not sure that most literary sites believe that anymore or rather, that they have narrowed their definitions of potential readers to a size that makes it too small for general readers (and book buyers) like me to feel welcome.

I'm going to send some queries out to a few science sites for the piece I have on those YA nonfiction books. I'm hoping it will have a better reception there.

*Nope, I'm not going to name names because then this becomes a big me vs them post and I just don't have the energy for that level of online dramarama right now.

While growing up, visits were stilted and uncomfortable and full of nervousness that he might stare at his grandfather's scars, after being told repeatedly by his mother that he must not. The two slowly began to connect only when Michael was sent alone to spend part of his summer holiday with his grandfather (who lived on the distant Scilly Isles) It is only after high school that Michael finally hear the story of what happened during the war and in the years afterwards when his grandparents split up. It is all as tragic as readers might expect and made all the more so by how everything went sadly wrong when the survivor, so horribly scarred, both physically and emotionally, returned home.

I read the book in minutes--there's not much to it after all--and was struck both by the gorgeous and scorching honesty of Morpurgo's story and the truly lovely accompanying illustrations by Gemma O'Callaghan. It's all such an elegant package and I really really love it but....I don't for a second think this is a book for kids 8-12 years-old.

It is not that the subject matter is too intense; kids read about horrible things all the time and there is nothing portrayed in a graphic manner (either through words or images) in Half a Man. But what the book is really about--compassion, empathy, becoming a man and sharing emotional honesty with those you love--well, I can't help but think it is all too much for the average tween. Are there some who will get it? Yes, yes, I'm sure they are out there. But this is a book that I believe requires the reader have more life experience then most middle graders bring to the table. I just don't think they have lived enough to get what Murpurgo is sharing and while Half a Man might not appear to be the sort of book that teens (and adults) should be reading I think they are the ones who will appreciate it the most.

(I have a very smart 9 year-old niece and I am 100% certain she would read this book, tell me it was sad and then move on without a backward glance after turning the last page. It's too much to expect her to get this one right now and a waste of time to try.)

Half a Man is an amazing book and I hope that it finds readers who will appreciate every single word.

[Interior spread via Candlewick Press.]

German Jews who relocate to Santa Fe is a pretty interesting family history without much added to it, but Nordhaus finds out a lot more as she looks for the reasons why Julia left Germany. Because the Staab family was so prominent in New Mexico history, newspaper coverage is abundant and there are also letters, diary entries and some personal histories along with general records that Nordhaus is able to mine for information. She also goes in a different direction as well and tries to communicate with Julia's ghost.

At first, the "ghostbusting" chapters seemed odd to me, like the author was padding the narrative. But slowly she makes it clear that her attempts to reach out to the ghost, (and find out of there even is a ghost), are also a bit about finding herself or perhaps finding how she feels about her ancestors. These chapters also provide a bit humor which is welcome as Julia's life has some truly tragic downturns and, as expected, not all of the family left Germany so there is some enormous sadness found there.

I have read several books about finding your family but this is the first one where a family member is a famous ghost which is really fairly outrageous when you think about it. I will admit I am envious of Nordhaus however--she has so much family history to fall back on, such a solid place to start from and I have only the tiniest shreds in comparison. But that envy did not reduce my ability to enjoy American Ghost a lot or glean some tips from her search.

In the wake of President Lincoln's assassination, Clara Templeton sets in motion events to find the secret to immortality. Flash forward 17 years and the American team pursuing this goal is mysteriously (almost magically) killed. Clara seeks to find out what happened but soon finds herself in a race against the British who are looking for their own answers as their competing team has also been killed.

Hieber splits the narrative primarily between Clara in New York City. and Harold Spire and Rose Everhart in London. Each side with their own trusted Scooby squads, they follow clues and try to find out what happened, all the while suspecting each other of the nefarious deeds. Of course (of course!!) there is more to it than that, but I'm sure Hieber will bring the groups together in the next installment and hopefully they will join forces sooner rather than later.

All the characters are good, especially Clara and Rose, who are smart and talented on their own while also realistically dealing with the gender politics of the day. Everyone else is quirky as all get out which makes sense as Hieber excels at quirky. There's all kinds of paranormal bits going on from mediums and clairvoyants to Voodoo. There are also class differences, a few jerks and some PTSD from lots of childhood trauma. So far, no romance but hints of some to come which would fit well in the layers of this mystery/thriller/drama.

So yeah, The Eterna Files is off to a bang-up start and shows Hieber doing what she does best yet again. I'll be back for the sequel; I just can't manage to stay away.

Because I continue to have an unquenchable attraction to big sweeping biographies of dysfunctional British families (I have no idea where this came from), I was delighted to have The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me by Sofka Zinovieff arrive at my door. (How in the heck Harper Collins knew I would want this book I will never know.)

Set in the period between the wars and forward (although there is some discussion of WWI as well), The Mad Boy tells the story of Lord Berners, one of those spectacularly unusual Brits (they dyed the birds at his estate in pastels as decorations!!!!) of a certain era who happened to be gay and fell hard for Robert Heber-Percy, a younger aristocrat who liked both men and women, lived life in a crazy near-suicidal way and was really really good looking.

And then there's Jennifer, who married Robert, promplty had his child and all of them lived (for a time*) at Berner's estate. Together. While all of English society wondered what the heck was going on.

It's not as salacious as you think (no wild orgies!) but more complicated and full of parties and marriages and divorces and things suspected but left unsaid and parties. LOTS OF PARTIES.

Here's what gets me about England and why I find so many aspects of its society so unbelievable:

The rules of primogeniture has kept together the huge fortunes of English lords; it has also formed the class system. It is the great distinction between the English aristocracy and any other; whereas abroad every member of a noble family is noble, in England non is except the head of the family. The sons and daughters may enjoy courtesy titles but as a rule the younger offspring of even the richest lords receive comparatively little money. Younger sons have thus habitually been left without money, property or title, often without the skills to acquire them and, above all, without belonging to the place they care most about. As clergymen, soldiers, sailors and resentful ne'er-do-wells, these high-born outcasts litter the pages of nineteenth-century English novels, with their hopeless attempts to make a way in the unfriendly world and their irresponsible sprees of adventuring.

So, while the The Mad Boy is a lot about people of the upper class having a certain life before WW2 and that how much that changed after WW2, it's also about a lot of people who weren't the first-born sons who were cast out of the lives they had known, the homes the loved and the lifestyles they were born to enjoy. It's.....well, it's crazy. You literally can never go home again and yet you also aren't supposed to (or prepared to) go get a job somewhere either.

Plus, you had parties with dyed birds because that kind of thing is just what you do!!

Zinovieff has done an enormous amount of research for this book and for all that there are a zillion names dropped, (visitors included all the Mitfords, Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Igor Stravinsky, Salvador Dalí and on and on), she keeps it well organized and easily sucks you in. (The pictures are stunning!!!) Consider it a guilty pleasure maybe, but a real eye-opener as well.

*Shockingly, the marriage did not last but Jennifer went on to marry Alex Ross and then live for a while in a cult before she really settled down.

For more see The Guardian review.

[Photo from the book cover, taken by Cecil Beaton. L-R, Lord Berners, Robert Heber-Percy holding daughter Victoria, wife Jennifer on right.]

Three U.S. Navy icebreakers pushing an iceberg out to sea to clear a channel leading to McMurdo Station, Antarctica, 29th December 1965. The ships are, left to right: the USS Burton, USS Atka and USS Glacier.

I am endlessly fascinated by ships and ice - no idea why but it explains why I loved that Polar Literature course in college so much. (Follow the link for more wicked cool pics!)

Aunt Tina and Uncle Mac did not have children and I knew she passed away, after him, in the late 1990s. My genealogy goals were thus pretty small: get the marriage certificate for them, get death certificates and likely just move on. Nothing to see here, right?*

The biggest problem with Tina is that I don't know Mac's first name. Obviously, he went by a nickname derived from MacLeod, so that's a bit of a puzzle. But I figured Ernestine Pressl (her maiden name) was odd enough that a marriage certificate shouldn't be too difficult. So I set them up at ancestry.com, did a search and there you go, a 1915 marriage certificate in NYC for Ernestine Pressl.

And William A. Wilson of London.

I paid to get a copy because I had to know if this was our Aunt Tina. How many Ernestine Pressls can there be after all? So after a few weeks it showed up and there she was, with the correct names for her parents (Marie Filak and Rudolph Pressl) and there was lovely William A., born in 1889, with his parents Pattie Clark and Arthur Wilson. It was a first marriage for both of them and took place in the same church as Tina's parents. This was definitely my family, I just didn't know a thing about what I was looking at.

First, I told my mother and she spent some time being shocked. ("No, Aunt Tina's husband was Uncle Mac. I met Uncle Mac, I remember Uncle Mac. Who in the world is William A. Wilson?")

Then I looked for a marriage between Ernestine Wilson (as that was her name for the 2nd marriage) and a MacLeod which came up with nothing. No idea what happened there. I'm thinking I'll have to spring for an international search as I've heard from family that Mac might have been Canadian. Maybe they went up there to get married? And beyond that, what happened to William? I looked in the records for British WWI deaths and there are, no surprise, more than a dozen William Wilsons. I'll have to find a way to search through those and see if my William is one of them (with a widow named Ernestine and middle name "A" which I bet is for Arthur). (How hard could it be to find him, right?!)

In the meantime I am looking at these pictures of Tina, taken around 1915, and wondering why on earth this had to be such a secret. There was never a mention of Tina as a widow, or divorced or with a man other than Mac. I can't help but think he disappeared from the family history simply because he was little known to all them. He was there and then he was gone and I guess didn't make enough of an impression.

Poor William A. Wilson; he didn't even rate a mention let alone a memory. And poor Aunt Tina, whose story, though a bit sadder, has just gotten a heckuva lot much more interesting.

[Post pic of Ernestines around 1910-1915. She was born in 1895, I figure she is in her late teens in these.]

*When am I going to learn to stop thinking that way? (Rhetorical question - genealogists never expect the kind of surprises that seem to be coming my way left and right lately.)

Isabel's War is something different however, it opens in a summer vacation hotel ala Dirty Dancing for one, and the title character is a twelve-year old American with a healthy chip on her shoulder and an awareness of her own shortcomings that is quite refreshing.

(Her mother is also the world's most critical women, but Isabel can deal with her.)

Isabel meets teenage Helga, the newly arrived German niece of her mother's good friend, while at Shady Pines. The girls are quickly thrown together as adults will do to kids, ("I'm sure you girls will get along just fine!"), and though they have little in common, a small friendship begins to develop. Soon enough though Isabel's family is thrown in to turmoil, and must return home, when her older brother enlists. She doesn't expect to see Helga anytime soon but then the family friend becomes ill, Helga needs a place to stay for awhile and just like that the girls are practically 24/7 together.

One of the things Perl did so well with this novel is let Isabel and Helgo become friends slowly. There's no rush to BFF-dom here and the fits and starts in their relationship make both girls easier to relate to. Two other great characters are Isabel's friend Sibby and her mother who are heavily involved in the news of the war (Sibby's father is a merchant marine). They force Isabel to become more engaged and it is through their influence that she begins to ask Helga smart questions about her past and finally uncovers just how she came to America.

There's some very good history in Isabel's War, especially about the Kindertransport which is rarely covered in teen history or literature. It's also nice to see how Sibby's mother learns about the horrors Jewish people faced in Europe--she makes a point of telling Isabel that you have to read the small parts of the newspaper on the back pages to get the whole truth. As this was how news of the Holocaust slowly came to the world, it's a nice touch that Perl has it explained that way in the text.

There's a bit of Nancy Drew appeal to Isabel's War; all of Helga's secrets get revealed and Isabel is relentless to get to the truth. There is also some self-righteous fury here aimed at willfully ignorant adults and some expected coming-of-age angst. It's all good and I enjoyed this novel a lot.

"I feel as if I've just come home," she told her mother the first day she stepped foot in Talkeetna. That feeling stayed with her for 50 years, until her death last week at home in that tight-knit Alaska community about 115 miles north of Anchorage.

From a childhood as part of a storied Alaskan family, to a flight attendant career where she visited cities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, Roberta embraced a wide view of the world that found her nevertheless returning to Alaska as a young woman.

In Alaska's aviation community, Roberta Sheldon's story always begins with mention of her parentage. Born in Seward in 1940, she was the eldest daughter of Bob Reeve, who pioneered the use of skis on mudflats and revitalized Valdez's mining industry with his flights to the claims surrounding the town. Popularly known as "the glacier pilot," Reeve would go on to be the only bush pilot under exclusive military contract during World War II. He then established Reeve Aleutian Airways in 1947, which dominated air routes along the Aleutian Islands for decades.

For the climbing community, Roberta Sheldon is part of the larger story of Denali, and Talkeetna's relationship with that mountain. In articles and books on that subject she is always mentioned in tandem with husband Don Sheldon, arguably the most famous pilot to ever fly on Denali. Don Sheldon was widely known and respected for owning and operating Talkeetna Air Service.

In his book "Moments of Doubt and Other Mountaineering Writings," climber David Roberts recalls the positive impact Roberta had on the company: "We met Roberta that summer [1965]. She was strikingly pretty, a slender woman with dark black hair. Somewhat shy, she had a sharp intelligence that she had put to work acting as Don's radio operator and bookkeeper. She also devised a chart to keep track of pick-up dates and parties; no longer would Sheldon file the whereabouts and needs of his myriad clients only in his head."

The couple were often presented as an Alaskan ideal to Outside readers, perhaps no more so than in a Life magazine article from 1964 -- the year they were married -- which described the couple thus:

This year Sheldon married Roberta Reeve, the pretty young daughter of Bob Reeve, one of the great pioneer bush pilots of the 1930s. Of course they took a flying honeymoon, and on it Sheldon made one of his rare miscalculations. Somewhat bedazzled by the presence of his bride as he landed on a frozen lake, he taxied too close to the outlet and the plane plunged through the thin ice. Bride and groom took an icy dunking and the embarrassed Sheldon had to send a sheepish Mayday call to get some pilot buddies to fly up and help get his plane out. But the wedding night drenching didn't seem to bother Roberta, and she has no intention of trying to change her husband's ways.

"I wouldn't try to keep him grounded if I could," she says. "Besides I know he can take care of himself." She says it firmly, as if she means it. Yet every night when Sheldon's plane bounces down on his abbreviated airstrip, Roberta comes running out to greet him with a great bear hug, as if, well, that's one more day he has come home.

After Don Sheldon's death from cancer in 1975, Roberta sold Talkeetna Air Service and became office manager of Genet Expeditions. Ray Genet was famous as a pioneer of the West Buttress route on Mount McKinley and member of the three-man team who made the first successful winter ascent of the mountain in 1967. Sheldon worked for Genet until his death in 1979 on a return climb after summiting Everest.

In the '80s and '90s Roberta Sheldon's focus on Talkeetna became razor sharp. And while she never wholly distanced herself from flying or mountaineering -- she even soloed on Ruth Glacier for her 40th birthday -- the love she had for the area propelled her into a more activist role. It was a calling she articulated well to author Joe McGinniss in "Going to Extremes", published in 1980: "I can't imagine living anyplace else. I feel my destiny is right here....I'm thinking of writing. I would like to try to get what this town is down on paper. I'd like to capture the humor of the town, the independence, the way the land has shaped the people and just the fine values of living here."

Determined to provide, as her son Robert Sheldon explained in a recent phone call, "a comprehensive overview of Talkeetna back to the Native history," she wrote "The Heritage of Talkeetna" which delves into the origins of the settlement. She followed this up with "The Mystery of the Cache Creek Murders," a deep look into a string of mining-related killings in 1939.

"She chose that event to research," explained Robert Sheldon, "because it marked a turning point for Talkeetna. After those crimes people came to understand that the worst could happen, that the old rules and codes no longer applied. Then land use plans happened, the community plans were formed, the Talkeetna region changed."

Roberta was not content, however, just to study the past. She became heavily involved in community matters, serving 11 years on the Talkeetna Community Council, nine of them as chairwoman. She was on the Board of Directors for the Talkeetna Historical Society for 13 years and the Talkeetna Comprehensive Land Use Committee for six. Governor Jay Hammond appointed her to the Denali Subsistence Resource Committee and Governor Tony Knowles appointed her to the Consultation Committee for Southside Denali Development. The list of accomplishments goes on and on.

According to daughter Kate Sheldon, Roberta "...was extremely proud that Talkeetna turned out to be The Model for commercial land-use in the State of Alaska," something of particular value to the large touring companies so prevalent in the area during the tourist season.

Further, according to son Robert Sheldon, "Pretty much any environmental project south of the Brooks Range my mother has been involved in on some level."

This was especially true of the proposed Susitna Dam project which Roberta was instrumental in fighting for years. As recently as 2012 she was on record against the dam, writing in The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman: "Some might think that a dynamite river with Alaska-caliber fish runs, together with a small, entrepreneurial town with a strong work ethic and economy, are worth sacrificing for an exorbitantly priced dam. Or, that the health of almost countless named and un-named tributaries and side-sloughs that harbor spawning salmon from the mouth of Cook Inlet to the proposed dam site doesn't count. Don't bet on it."

Coupled with her activism, Roberta's dedication to preserving Talkeetna's past and future extended to the purchase of historic buildings and making sure that history was visibly shared with the many visitors who come to the community every year. According to the State of Alaska Historic Preservation Office, she worked to get the Talkeetna Historic District established and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993 and the historic Talkeetna Village Airstrip listed, which happened on August 2, 2002. She also worked with the Denali Arts Council to acquire the old Talkeetna Air Service hangar and lot, which is now the home of the Sheldon Community Arts Hangar.

Perhaps most famous among the climbing community is Roberta's steadfast preservation of the Mountain House, a shelter constructed by Don Sheldon and friends in 1966 on the South Face of Denali. Located on a 5-acre rock and ice outcrop at the 6,000-foot level, in the middle of what is now known as the Don Sheldon Amphitheater of the Ruth Gorge, the Mountain House is managed by Alaska Mountaineering School but firmly owned by the Sheldon family. Aerial tours of the Mountain House are available through several Talkeetna air taxis including Sheldon Air Service, owned and operated by Don and Roberta's daughter Holly and her husband.

"My mother lived her life with discipline and dignity," said Robert Sheldon. Her legacy, found from Ruth Glacier to the banks of the Susitna and along the streets of Talkeetna, is certainly one that many Alaskans can aspire to. "She taught us if something was worth doing, it was worth doing right," says her son. Roberta's entire life is a testament to this credo and the mark she has made on Alaska's history is one that should not soon be forgotten.

A celebration of life for Roberta Sheldon is planned for June 22 at 4 p.m. in the Sheldon Arts Community Hangar in Talkeetna. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be mailed to the Talkeetna Defense Fund at P.O. Box 292, Talkeetna, AK 99676. Both of Sheldon's books can be purchased at bookstores across Alaska or direct from the Talkeetna Historical Society.

Founded in 1980 by partners Kitty Banner and Kimball Forest -- who took advantage of their first initials to give the air taxi its mountainesque sounding name -- K2 Aviation is an air taxi operation based in Talkeetna, the jumping-off point to North America's highest peak, Mt. McKinley. After being sold to Jim and Julie Okonek in 1981 and operated by them until 1996, K2 was then purchased by the Rust family who also own and operate Rust's Flying Service. While Rust's is based at Lake Hood Seaplane Base in Anchorage, K2 remains in Talkeetna and is deeply associated with Denali flightseeing tours and local charters.

Related:
Longtime charter operator Ward Air soars in Southeast Alaska

With a fleet that includes Cessna 185s, de Havilland Beavers and Otters, a Cherokee Six and a Piper Navajo, K2 has aircraft that fly on floats, skis and wheels. They excel at "off-airport" work and provide transportation services for a wide range of Alaska activities both inside and outside of Denali National Park.

"We have lodge and cabin clients needing supplies and general transportation, as well as providing support for mining companies, land surveying, government charters and fuel hauling," said Operations Manager Suzanne Rust. In the past they have also chartered for oil companies on the North Slope.

The bulk of K2's business, however, still resides in the park. As one of only four air taxis -- the others are Sheldon Air Services, Fly Denali and Talkeetna Air Taxi -- to hold concessions permitting glacier landings on Mount McKinley, there are a wide range of tourism and mountaineering companies who rely on K2 and return to them year after year. According to Rust, the park is central to everything K2 does.

"There are 6 million acres in the park that we share with visitors every year," Rust said. "It's a trip of a lifetime for people and we don't forget that. The park is truly an amazing place and we value the opportunity to share it with everyone who comes here.

"What we hope," she continued, "is that they will leave and never forget it."

Visitors to Talkeetna are quick to realize that aviation is one of the town's central industries and flying out of there usually means flying into the park and flying on or near "The Mountain."

"Aviation is a way of life for people here," Rust said. "It's a very different way of life then what people are used to from Outside."

In the years since the unique capabilities of pioneer Talkeetna bush pilots Don Sheldon and Cliff Hudson made the small community famous in climbing circles, a lot has changed. K2 and other Talkeetna-based air services band together to hire a base camp manager. Communications technology keeps the air services in touch with base camp.

"There are blogging climbers now!" Rust laughed.

This technology allows them to create a workable schedule during the busy climbing/tourist season, while keeping one eye on the constantly-changing weather. "We don't want to miss a [flying] window," explains Rust. "We are constantly anticipating when we need to be picking someone up."

In many ways, K2 is an example of how much aviation has had to evolve in Alaska. The company is still providing the same basic service that Banner and Forest promised more than 30 years ago and certainly operate in the echo of all those pilots who flew on McKinley before them. But they now use GPS and satellite phones to keep a far greater degree of control on the schedule then was possible in the past, all while reaching out via longtime guides and the web to promise a park flying experience that will satisfy visitors' dreams.

"No day is ever the same for us," Rust said. But clearly, wherever the job takes them, K2 Aviation is excited to share the ride.

In another recent accident, an aircraft operated by Hageland crashed outside of St. Marys in late November, killing the pilot and three passengers and leaving six other passengers with serious injuries.

Related:
Scores of villagers help pull out survivors of St. Marys plane crash 'disaster'; 4 perish
NTSB prepares to visit site of Hageland Aviation plane crash that killed 2

The latest crash joins three other accidents and an incident -- the difference between an accident and an incident is determined by NTSB regulations and involves levels of damage and injury as determined by investigators -- involving Ravn Alaska air group members that are under active investigation by the NTSB. When reviewed as a group, they reveal a pattern of mishaps dating back more than 18 months, which have cumulatively resulted in six deaths.

According to a preliminary NTSB report, the first of these mishaps occurred in September 2012 when an Era Aviation de Havilland DHC-8 departing Anchorage International Airport experienced "an uncommanded left roll and uncontrolled descent during climb at about 12,000 feet." The flight crew regained control at about 7,000 feet and returned to land. None of the 12 passengers or three crew members were injured.

Due to the size of the aircraft and the nature of the operation -- Era Aviation operates under the more-stringent Part 121 section of the Federal Aviation Regulations due to the size of its aircraft and passenger loads -- this incident was turned over to Washington, D.C.-based NTSB officials for investigation.

Then, in October 2013, an Era Aviation Beechcraft 1900 suffered a collapse of the nose and main landing gear while landing in Homer. The flight crew and 13 passengers were uninjured but the aircraft received substantial damage.

In discussing the events at Anchorage and Homer in a recent phone conversation, Washington D.C.-based NTSB public affairs officer Eric Weiss explained that the investigations will extend as far as possible to understand not only what happened, but why. This could include moving the investigation beyond the individual events and into the overall management of the air group. "If answering the question of why extends to management and the overall safety culture, we will look at that," said Weiss. "We will go wherever the investigation takes us."

On Nov. 22, another Beechcraft 1900, this one operated by Hageland Aviation, hit the elevated edge of the runway surface while landing at Badami Airport near Deadhorse. According to the preliminary report, the right main landing gear separated and the airplane slid along the runway surface, causing substantial damage. Weather in Badami at the time of the accident included heavy blowing snow and broken clouds at 1,000 feet, with a half-mile of visibility.

Five days later, Era Alaska Flight 1453 -- operated by Hageland Aviation -- departed Bethel and crashed within 40 minutes near St. Marys, resulting in those four fatalities and six injuries. Instrument meteorological conditions prevailed at St. Marys when the flight was dispatched, with a ceiling of 300 feet and an overcast sky at the time of the crash. Despite conditions requiring instrument navigation, flight 1453 was operating under visual flight rules. The Badami, St. Marys and recent Bethel accident are all under investigation by the Anchorage NTSB office.

According to investigator Clint Johnson, those accidents are all in the fact-gathering stage. Once analysis of those facts has taken place, the NTSB will look at the carrier as a whole to consider, for example, if there are overall concerns with pilot training, maintenance, oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration or other factors.

"At this point we are working on a case-by-case basis," Johnson said.

The FAA has increased surveillance of the Hageland operation in Bethel since the St. Marys accident. While officials could not confirm any possible enforcement action against the company in the wake of the most recent fatal crash, the FAA asserted that its policy is to "explore all options to address our enforcement responsibilities."

Both Hageland Aviation and Era Aviation are cooperating with all the investigations.

Ownership and operational control of the three air carriers under the Ravn Alaska umbrella is complex and deeply rooted in the companies' history. The first combining of resources between two members of the group came in 2008. The owners of Hageland Aviation Services -- Mike Hageland and Jim Tweto -- and the owner of Frontier Flying Service -- John Hajdukovich -- established a parent company named HoTh Inc. This company was formed to create a self-described "airgroup" where, according to the company website, "the parent company could acquire companies that have synergies with each other (to) market the combined services under a common brand." State records show that presently HoTh Inc. is owned by Tweto (11 percent), Hageland (39 percent) and Robert Hajdukovich (50 percent).

HoTH Inc. owns Frontier Flying Service, Hageland Aviation Services and Era Aviation, the latter of which was purchased in 2009.

Each of the three companies have separate directors of operation and chief pilots, though Frontier and Era share a CEO in Robert Hajdukovich. The CEO of Hageland Aviation is James Hickerson. The FAA has also assigned individual Certificate Management Teams to each company with specific principal operations and maintenance inspectors and separate annual inspections.

Alaska Airlines currently partners with Era Alaska in a "code-sharing" relationship. This allows passengers to purchase tickets from a point of departure with Alaska Airlines all the way through to a destination operated by one of the Era Alaska air group members. This will likely change to Ravn Alaska soon as part of the Era Alaska rebranding effort.

This seamless scheduling and travel is part of the Alaska Airlines/Era Alaska relationship and based upon "consistent passenger service standards and procedures" for the duration of transport.

Hageland, however, will soon be removed from that equation. In an email, Alaska Airlines spokesperson Bobbie Egan wrote:

"Alaska Air Group maintains a comprehensive safety oversight program of all of our alliance partners. This includes operational safety focused assessments, regular monitoring, and meetings with these partner airlines. As part of this program, Alaska Air Group made the policy decision in December 2013 to begin unwinding our business partnership with Hageland Aviation, Inc. ... This business partnership will fully terminate this month."

Egan said that Hageland is the only Ravn Alaska member Alaska Airlines is terminating its relationship with.

Hageland Aviation recently opened a new centralized operation center in Palmer that will weigh 25-30 risk factors prior to each flight as part of a new and enhanced risk management approach. Dispatchers at the center are in constant contact with pilots during their flights. This is unusual for a smaller operator -- referred to as Part 135 under Federal Aviation Regulations -- like Hageland. The center mirrors the one utilized by Era Aviation in Anchorage, and similar to those required of all Part 121 airlines.

As the five investigations continue, the operation and training standards of all of Ravn Alaska member airlines will likely receive more scrutiny from FAA and NTSB investigators. With Ravn Alaska's common ownership, common management and common reservation and scheduling systems, it presents a unique and complicated situation for accident investigators and enforcement officials.

Although Hageland Aviation aircraft may present in different livery or colors and the pilots may or may not wear uniforms to match those of Anchorage-based flight crews, the airline itself is owned and operated by the same group of individuals that owns and operates its sister companies. Since the 2008 combination of resources, there have been six Hageland Aviation accidents in addition to two fatality crashes, five of which occurred in the Bethel region. In fact, accidents involving Bethel-based aircraft have long dominated Hageland's accident history, which includes crashes in such villages as Marshall, Scammon Bay, Kongiganak, Kwigillingok and Bethel itself. As an integral part of the group, that accident history has belonged first to Frontier Alaska and then Era Alaska and now, through the rebranding, Ravn Alaska.

As owners, the open accident and incident investigations are the collective responsibility of the HoTH board of directors. Ultimately, the current fatality crash, and the one in St. Marys, are just as much a part of Ravn Alaska's future as they are of Hageland Aviation's.

The probable cause report for the 2012 incident should be released later this year. The reports for 2013 accidents may extend into early 2015. All of the Ravn Alaska flights continue to operate as scheduled and the Hageland Aviation base in Bethel remains open.

For the past several decades, the most famous missing aircraft in Alaska has been a Cessna 310 that vanished October 16, 1972 while enroute from Anchorage to Juneau. Alaska Congressman Nick Begich, (whose son Mark represents Alaska in the U.S. Senate), was traveling for his re-election campaign and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, a congressman from Louisiana, agreed to campaign with him. The C-310, which also had aide Russell Brown and pilot Don Jonz aboard, was last heard from shortly after departing Anchorage. The final radio transmission gave no hint of trouble although weather in the area was marginal.

Over the next 39 days, 90 aircraft covered a massive search area but never spotted a sign of survivors or wreckage. The Begich accident prompted Congress to pass a law mandating an Emergency Locator Transmitter be required equipment in all civilian aircraft and also led to the development of the U.S. Search and Rescue Satellite Aided Tracking System.

At the time, the 1972 search totaled 3,900 flight hours and was considered the largest search and rescue operation in American history. There have been many other comparable searches however, dating back to the earliest days of Bush flying in the territory. The first of comparable size was in 1929 when in the span of two months Alaska lost of two of its most famous pilots.

On September 16, 1929, Russ Merrill went missing while flying his amphibious Travel Air from Anchorage to the Bear Creek mine at Nyac (near Bethel). Pilots searched for him across the Alaska Range, along the coast of the Gulf of Alaska, through Merrill Pass and Rainy Pass and everywhere in between. Ben Eielson alone flew 3,000 miles in the first three days of the search and then pilot Joe Crosson quickly accomplished the same amount. The U.S. Coast Guard and private ships soon joined in.

Messages were dropped to hunting camps and Alaska Native fishermen were visited along the coast. Newspapers across the state covered the relentless search, holding out hope for discovery. On Oct. 20, a small piece of fabric that had been found by a hunter three weeks earlier near the village of Tyonek was finally presented to the searchers. It was identified by Merrill's mechanic as matching that on the aircraft "Anchorage No. 1". The search officially ended one week later. It was surmised that the plane was forced to land on the water for unknown reasons and Merrill was unable to get to shore. He died, apparently on the day he disappeared, in Cook Inlet.

By mid-October, Ben Eielson had pulled himself away from the search for Merrill to fulfill a contract hauling furs from an icebound ship off the coast of Siberia. On Nov. 9 he and mechanic Earl Borland departed from Teller in their all-metal-cabin Hamilton aircraft and were never seen alive again. That "Eielson Relief Expedition" lasted two and half months and involved not only pilots and mechanics from Alaska and Canada, but also the assistance of Soviet pilots and aircraft as well as Siberian dog mushers on the ground. The Aviation Corporation, Eielson's employer, spent more than $500,000. The wreckage was finally sighted on Jan. 25 of the following year and then, after three additional weeks of digging in the snow by more than a dozen men, the bodies of Borland and Eielson were found.

Eight years later, Alaskans assisted their new Russian friends when a multi-engine bomber, the Bolkhovitinov DB-A, was modified to carry extra fuel and attempt a nonstop flight from from Moscow to Fairbanks. After reporting the loss of an engine and need for an emergency landing more than 14 hours into the flight, nothing else was heard from the six-member crew under the command of Sigizmund Levanevsky ("the Russian Lindbergh"). Somewhere off the northern coast of Alaska, the aircraft went down and although polar explorer Sir George Hubert Wilkins (who was first to cross the Arctic with Eielson in 1928) led an aerial search for weeks over an area "larger than Montana," no sign of the aircraft was ever found. Searches continue to the present day however, including one supported by the Russian Geographic Society last fall that visited the North Slope village of Nuiqsut.

There were plenty of reasons to support long search and rescue missions because more often than not, early pilots were found. In 1928, Russ Merrill and his passengers were found walking on the tundra three weeks after being forced to land by a storm north of Wainwright. A similar discovery was made in 1927 when Eielson and Wilkins were forced down over the sea ice about 100 miles northeast of Barrow. They walked for two weeks before arriving at the fur-trading post Beechey Point. Their survival was heralded as proof that men marooned on the pack ice could hike to safety.

In 1943, two weeks after a search involving 40 aircraft and boats from the Coast Guard was halted, survivors were found alive near Ketchikan from a crash a month earlier involving Bush pilot Harold Gillam. Although Gillam and passenger Susan Baxter were dead, four passengers were rescued by the Coast Guard who spotted two of the men after they managed to hike to a beach. The survival at Boca de Quadra Inlet, when everyone was convinced the aircraft had gone in to the ocean, taught Alaskans to be patient, even in the face of the most hostile terrain.

Aircraft have continued to go missing in the years since the loss of Nick Begich. Even in the 21st century, with all of its advanced technology, it is not uncommon to lose a plane. In 2003, a Cessna 180 was lost along with two passengers and the pilot while flying from Hallo Bay to Homer. In 2004 a de Havilland Beaver on floats went missing after departing Sitka for a glacier tour flight with four passengers onboard. In 2009 a husband and wife flying from Wolf Lake, near Palmer, to Whitehorse, disappeared in their Beechcraft Bonanza. In 2010, a de Havilland Beaver apparently crashed in Katmai National Park while transporting park employees. After covering 60,000 miles with a dozen aircraft, only a few small fragments of the aircraft were found on a beach northwest of Sukoi Bay five weeks later. No sign of the pilot and three passengers, two of whom were brothers, was found.

In 2012 student pilot Brendan Mattingly departed Soldotna in his Super Cub and flew a course that ended over Cook Inlet. Last September, landing gear from the plane was found by beachcombers on Sitkinak Island near Kodiak, confirming his presumed crash in the inlet. A similar end is believed to have befallen Alan Foster, who in the fall of 2013 was flying the final leg of a Georgia-to-Anchorage trip in his Piper Cherokee when he was last seen alive while refueling in Yakutat. His aircraft dropped off the radar near Malaspina Glacier.

Every missing aircraft case remains open in the Alaska Crash Database, which is maintained by the Alaska Air National Guard Rescue Coordination Center. Although the NTSB will record a probable cause of "undetermined" for these flights until evidence is presented otherwise, the database holds the last known location for the aircraft and the NTSB notes all clues gathered in its investigation. Sometimes, it is years before evidence presents itself and explanations for what went wrong are revealed.

In 2012, Colony Glacier gave up the wreckage of a C-124 Globemaster that went missing in 1952 while en route to Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage with 52 men aboard. In the days that followed the final radio transmission, 32 military aircraft and four Coast Guard vessels searched the area. As historian Douglas Beckstead explained in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News two years ago, the aircraft's tail section was located over a week later at the 8,100 foot level of Surprise Glacier, "...[a]lmost at the top of Mount Gannett." Blizzard conditions made recovery dangerous and weeks later, the military had to abandon the aircraft. It remained buried under several feet of snow for decades, moving more than 12 miles with the glacier before it was spotted by a helicopter crew 60 years later.

For the families of the Globemaster dead, the aircraft's return brought answers to questions that had been handed down for generations. It is these same questions that propel Russian and American historians to keep looking for the Bolkhovitinov DB-A and why the aircraft database remains open until definitive proof of a crash can be obtained.

Everyone always wants to know what happened; they want to know how; they hope to know why.

In Alaska, the aviation community has learned the hard lesson that while "missing" is only part of the story, sometimes it can be a very long time before the true ending is known.

IceBridge serves first and foremost as a continuity mission for the period that began in 2009 when the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) reached the end of its operational lifespan. ICESat-2 is scheduled to launch in 2017 and in the meantime, IceBridge will continue to monitor Earth's polar ice -- over both the north and south poles -- so that a data gap will not exist between the two satellite deployments. Between March and May of this year, the Arctic campaign is operating first out of Thule Air Force Base, to monitor ice accumulation on the Greenland Ice Sheet, later out of the more southern Greenland location of Kangerlussuaq and also overflying the Arctic Ocean regions off Alaska in the Beaufort and Chukchi areas.

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According to an article in Earthzine by IceBridge Science Outreach Coordinator George Hale, the two main IceBridge aircraft, the P3 and a DC-8, (which is not flying for this mission), are equipped with a variety of instruments "...ranging from laser altimeters and advanced radars, to digital imaging systems and even magnetic, gravity and surface temperature sensors." These instruments are designed to "gather information on ice surface elevation, ice thickness, snow depth, snow accumulation, and the shape of bedrock and water beneath the ice." If successful, the survey flights will provide a solid snapshot of the size and condition of the monitored ice which reveals how the ice has changed over time.

One of the new instruments being tested on this mission is a spectrometer used to measure ice albedo or reflectivity. According to NASA sea ice scientist Nathan Kurtz, quoted on the IceBridge website, "A small change in albedo over the entire Arctic could have a significant effect on how much heat is absorbed by the surface."

In a recent email exchange, Program Manager Jim Yungel, who is with the mission in Greenland and Alaska, said the new albedo instrument is acquiring data as designed.

"It will be a challenge converting the data into accurate albedo due to the exceeding low sun angles encountered on the missions to date," said Yungel. "but that should improve as we continue to fly later into the spring. We look forward to working with scientists to understand the data we're collecting and how to improve the instrument in the future."

When gathering data, the P3 generally flies at 1,500 feet, as permitted by terrain and weather. It may also, according to Yungel, fly as low as 1,000 feet to get under clouds. "One of the reasons we fly low is to increase the accuracy of the Lidar and radar instruments, since accuracy in measuring aircraft attitude (recorded by laser gyro INS instruments) increases with altitude," he wrote. "Fifteen hundred feet has proved to be the best compromise between accuracy of data (keeping the attitude errors low) and obtaining a wide swath of data."

This year Operation IceBridge is also working with the Seasonal Ice Zone Reconnaissance Surveys program -- located in the East Beaufort sea -- and CryoVex Marginal Ice Zone Camp #2 -- near Barrow -- both of which are studying sea ice and thickness from the ground.

In Fairbanks, Geophysical Institute professor Chris Larsen oversees the glacier altimetry program and has been director of Operation IceBridge since 2009. He followed in the footsteps of institute glaciologist Keith Echelmeyer, who started flying routes over the state's glaciers in 1991. Echelmeyer, who died in 2010, set the standard according to Larsen while personally introducing him to aviation. Larsen now flies his own Cessna 180 on Echelmeyer's established flight paths using a specially mounted LiDAR instrument to measure over 200 glaciers. Ultima Thule Lodge pilot Paul Claus also flies the paths in support of the program in one of his De Havilland Otters with similar equipment.

"Paul and I fly over glaciers in several different fields across the state, including the Stikine Icefield, Glacier Bay National Park, Wrangell St. Elias, the Chugach Icefield and the Alaska Range including Denali," Larsen said in a recent phone conversation. "We try to visit 100 of the glaciers a year, spending about 100 to 150 hours annually in the air between the two of us."

Much of the flying is "below the ridgeline" according to Larsen, at 1,500 feet or less, and he relies on Claus in the more remote areas where his extensive back country flying experience comes into play.

For Larsen, the mission is a "dream come true" and he is particularly interested in visiting a few of the glaciers again this year that exhibited some serious changes in 2013.

Glaciology's use of aviation in Alaska carries on in the footsteps of many other modes of transportation dating back to John Muir's journeys by canoe with Tlingit guides at the end of the 19th century through the Lynn Canal area. His naming of glaciers in Southeast and reports on their size and and changes over time, sparked an interest in the region that directly led to the establishment of Glacier Bay National Park. The study of the state's glaciers is in-depth and well-documented with a massive amount of data; the current visit from Operation IceBridge is just another way to study Alaska's ice and learn what it can tell us about the global climate.

For more on John Muir's exploration of Alaska's glaciers, watch for "John Muir and the Ice that Started the Fire" by Gustavus author Kim Heacox due in April from Lyons Press.

For the past dozen years or so, Schultz has flown the race with Danny Davidson, an Iditarod Air Force veteran of more than 30 years who has modified his aircraft for the photographer so the window will easily open and close. Although he now flies mostly in a Cessna 180, for the first two decades Schultz flew in Piper PA-12s or Super Cubs.

"For doing aerial photos," he explained, "the Cub is much better because it can fly low and slow and pretty quiet. But with the right pilot, it can be done with the 180 as well ... just not so low or quiet." Now, "unless its unavoidable," he said, he shoots through an open window, usually in Davidson's C-180.

The photographer's favorite stretch of trail is in the early days of each year's race, from Finger Lake to Rohn. "I've snowmachined this portion of the trail many times," he wrote. "Big mountains, small dog teams." A dramatic background -- "something other than a flat trail" -- is a feature Schultz always looks for. He's also on the watch for the unexpected, like "a musher falling down, running behind the sled, unique facial feature or body language." These shots, which might appear lucky, are actually the result of hours of patience and preparation. A perfect example of which is one of his favorite trail moments:

After 33 years on the trail, yes there are many favorite memories... they are typically linked to a unique photo that I was able to capture. Like the time my pilot, Sam Maxwell, and I landed on a small swamp in his cub in the Farewell Burn and I hiked a mile or two to an open stream and waited for teams to cross. Unique photos and a unique way to get there.

It's surprising to hear Schultz talk so comfortably about flying the race, in light of the serious crash he was involved in more than 20 years ago. In 1992, Schultz was with pilot Chris McDonnell in a Super Cub near Golovin when something went horribly wrong. This story is one of the longer chapters in his book, which includes several pictures of the crash. He is still hazy on some of the facts: "...we were following the shoreline -- fish shacks and willows. Suddenly we were in a milk-bottle and could not see. The pilot turned to go back and never recovered from that turn. Vertigo. We hit the ice. Neither of us remember the crash nor getting out of the plane. Very dazed and confused. 4-5 hours later we were rescued by people from Golovin and medevaced to Anchorage."

The National Transportation Safety Board later determined that McDonnell had inadvertently flown under Visual Flight Rules into Instrument Meteorological Conditions. The accident's probable cause was determined to be failure to maintain proper altitude; additional factors included fog, snow and night.

Jeff Schultz's long relationship with the Iditarod is a perfect example of how Alaska's past and present have come together. Early on, aviation and dog mushing were competitors, and in the end, aircraft spelled the end for the mushing way of life. But now, with sled dog racing firmly established as a popular sport in the state, aviation has become a way to appreciate it from a whole new perspective, as well as providing crucial support during major races. In his decades with the race, Schultz has flown every step of its more than 1,000 miles and pilots have enabled him to capture the people, places and dogs that make this event such an important part of the Last Frontier way of life. Clearly, in his case, "Chasing Dogs" is something best done from the passenger seat of an airplane.

"Chasing Dogs" includes over 300 full color pictures and will be published in May; autographed copies of the book may be purchased through Jeff Schultz's Iditarod website. Wholesale orders should be placed through Taku Graphics: Alaska Art and Books in Juneau.

Shortly after she started work for the section, this pilot was asked to fly a Cessna 208 to Kodiak Island and pick up some people. After checking the weather, he informed her that the weather was not good and he did not want to go. When she informed the colonel (Commander of AWT), the response was that the pilot needed to "get in the plane and go."

Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Gary Folger, the former commander named in Hassell's statement, has denied the implication that he influenced pilot Rod Wilkinson's decision to take that flight, insisting in an email to the Anchorage Daily News that "I have never made someone fly, it's entirely up to the pilot."

The issue of pilot pressure has been part of the aviation landscape in Alaska since its earliest days. Kotzebue airline owner Archie Ferguson was infamous for pushing his pilots to fly, as recounted in this 1943 observation by author Jean Potter in her book "The Flying North":

He is driven to distraction when one of his men is weather bound away from Kotzebue. "Christ," he will yell over the radio, with other airway stations listening. "I suppose yer boozin' or God knows what yer doin'. The weather's fine here. Come on back!" He is enraged when one of the pilots muffs a takeoff from Kotzebue's frozen winter runway. He will stand by the field jumping, hitching up his pants, shouting and swearing. "Christ, hurry up! I'm losin' five hundreds bucks a day! Oh Jeezus, I guess I'll have ta do all the flyin' myself!"

Ferguson paid his pilots by commission only, similar to the practice of paying just for flight time, or "when the props are turning," which is still common practice among air taxi operators. This practice can lead pilots to obtain as much flight time as possible in an effort to give a boost to their paychecks. Being paid by salary can create an opposite problem, where pilots can be pushed to "justify their salary" and get in the air.

In decades of observing Alaska's aviation environment, the NTSB has clarified four primary sources of pressure on commercial pilots to accept high risk flights: passengers, U.S. Postal Service delivery policies, self-induced pressure or "bush pilot syndrome," and management attitude. In several studies the agency found that all too often, a flight under Visual Flight Rules into Instrument Meteorological Conditions was not unusual, and largely considered part of the job. The only way to mitigate this attitude was to institute a strong safety culture with firm standards concerning risk assessment from management on down.

One of the primary reasons it's so difficult to quantify pressure to fly is obvious; it is nearly impossible to prove its existence in an accident investigation. There have been cases where the NTSB found anecdotal evidence such as a 2010 accident when a de Havilland Beaver operated by Branch River Air Service impacted the water near Katmai National Park; the pilot and three passengers are missing and presumed dead. Weather conditions along the route from the camp where the aircraft departed suffered low cloud ceilings almost to the water. The pilot reportedly told campers at the site he could not stay to wait out the weather, however, as he had another flight scheduled out of King Salmon later that day.

Also, in 2001, a Piper Cherokee Six operated by LAB Flying Service crashed on a tour flight after departing Skagway; the pilot and five passengers were killed. While a VFR flight plan was in effect, IMC prevailed. The pilot's medical records revealed he was being treated with antidepressants prescribed for anxiety. According to the probable cause report, he told his doctor that "...it often comes on when there is bad weather and he has to fly."

And in 1997, a Cessna Caravan operated by Hageland Aviation Services went into the ocean while inbound to Wainwright, on Alaska's Arctic coast. The pilot and four passengers were killed. That aircraft was also operating under a VFR flight plan while IMC prevailed.

In that accident, the pilot's wife, also a Hageland's employee, asserted to the NTSB that there was no pressure from the passengers or company to fly but then noted the passengers had been scheduled for an earlier flight that was canceled and "...had waited all day to go and were anxious to leave Barrow." The company's director of operations stated that "the pilot may have felt some pressure to conduct the accident flight from the passengers and also from the pilot's own desire to perform satisfactorily for the company." He asserted there was no pressure from the company, however, as the pilot was on salary and "the pilots are paid whether they fly or not".

All of these crashes, and many more like them, were determined to be due to pilot error.

It is largely unknown whether trooper pilot Rod Wilkinson felt pressured by his superior to accept what turned out to be a successful flight to Kodiak in 2009, or if Helo-1 pilot Mel Nading felt self-induced pressure to earn more money when accepting his final flight last March. But the suggestion of pressure within the troopers' Aircraft Section is a concern that must not be casually dismissed. Unlike air taxis and commuters, public use aircraft do not fall under the stricter regulations of Part 135 of the Federal Aviation Regulations and thus have far less oversight from air safety inspectors. Under FAR Part 91, there is no mechanism for outside inspection of the Aircraft Division's operational standards and no way, other than post-accident investigation, for federal agencies to assess its safety structure. By then, of course, it's too late.

While a pilot, whether flying commercially, for public use or for personal purposes, is always ultimately responsible for embarking on a flight, the factors affecting that decision are powerful and potentially dangerous. Pressure is subtle and personal, it calls into mind a pilot's abilities to complete his or her job in a profession where mistakes are rarely forgiven. Whether a superior demands a flight be conducted or a fellow pilot insists he does not consider conditions to be too difficult or a person's life is presented as hanging in the balance, the end result is the same: a pilot is forced to fly based on someone else's decision and not their own. Before the wheels leave the ground, the flight is already compromised and its successful completion in jeopardy.

It's the easiest thing in the world to say a pilot agreed to accept a flight and thus its failure is solely his or her fault. It's much more difficult and expensive to hire aviation professionals who can craft an in-depth operations manual, a risk assessment checklist and a training curriculum that emphasizes safety. As so many commercial operators in Alaska have come to learn the hard way however, successful completion of a flight sometimes means never departing in the first place. Based on the document release, AST's Aircraft Division has yet to fully understand this fact or the steps that must be taken to understand the complexity of pilot pressure.

"I was 25 years old," Fehringer said, "and this was the adventure of my life." What Fehringer didn't realize in those early days was just how much aviation would come to be part of his new home and the art he would make there.

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Fehringer is most widely known for the eye-catching labels of the Alaskan Brewing Company that carry his images on their bottles. Capturing many aspects of Alaska life from eagles and bears to boats and outdoor sports -- even surfing -- the labels stand out due to Fehringer's distinctive use of light. His favorite time of day is the hour before sunset when the light is "low and sharp."

"In the middle of the day," he explained in a recent phone conversation, "there is no drama, no contrast." Perfect light is what Fehringer seeks and it was light that brought him to his first aviation painting, "Descent:"

I was not an aviation person but I saw planes all over Juneau. They are everywhere -- part of the uniqueness of living in Alaska. In Southeast there are all these planes on pontoons that I couldn't help but notice. I had taken some photos of a plane coming in one day and when I got them back I knew I had something. "Descent" became my first aviation piece and it sold out in a couple of months. So from then on, I started painting more aircraft.

What Fehringer did not expect was the positive reception his new subject received from pilots who began attending his shows and seeking him out to discuss his technique. All too often, though, he found he could not answer their more technical questions. Determined to be as accurate as possible, and able to engage with his new customers, he took an unusual step and enrolled in ground school in Juneau. He followed that up by later obtaining a private pilot's license in Arizona. "Now," he said, "I could talk about flying and understand better what the pilots were saying to me."

"Descent" has been followed by many other aviation paintings including "Early Arrival," "Deliverance" and "Play Misty." His most recent aircraft painting is "Many Happy Returns," which includes his first wheeled aircraft. "It felt empty at first," he says, "without the pontoons. I was not sure if the light and the drama would come through with all that space." He wanted the challenge though, and possibilities of a different type of aircraft.

Fehringer is quick to make clear he is an artist first and foremost, and has very low flight time. And though he works hard to be accurate about the mechanics of flying, his paintings are, more than anything, just another step in his continued effort to capture the spirit of adventure that impressed him so long ago when he arrived in Alaska.

"There was no adventure where I came from," he explains. "I paint these aircraft because of the beauty and romance I see behind them. They have become characters to me in the story I am trying to tell of Alaska."

Many artists have come to Alaska and contributed to the always-evolving vision of the state and its singular place in American mythology. What John Fehringer continues to see is that first moment when he walked off the ferry in Juneau and found something his life had been missing. That moment of awe is what he hopes to share in every painting, he said. Fortunately for pilots, his landscape includes the sight of aircraft winging their way through some of the best flying in the world and always with spectacular light on their side.

John Fehringer works with an airbrush and opaque watercolor (gouache) to create his original paintings. You can find more of his work at his website where prints, art cards, etc. are for sale. His work can also be found for sale in Annie Kaill's gallery and Taku Graphics, both in Juneau.

Perhaps more alarming is the realization that we are not even halfway through the most dangerous flying season.

In surveying accident data for the past five years, it is clear that more than half the annual aircraft crashes take place between June 1 and Sept. 30. This makes sense as Alaska sees increased traffic during those months. There is also an increase in pilots flying here from out of state, as in the group led by the aircraft involved in the June 28 Cantwell crash. Consequently, the significance of the next three months on the safety record for 2013 cannot be overstated.

From 2008 to 2012, Alaska averaged 60 accidents between June and September with a high of 67 in 2012 and a low of 53 in 2010. They range widely in severity, as crashes do throughout the year. But their frequency should raise alarms for Alaska pilots. With the overwhelming percentage of accidents in the state still involving pilot error as a cause or factor, any steps that can be taken to avoid adding to those statistics should be.

Pilots should practice extreme caution when encountering inclement weather and err on the side of caution. They should familiarize themselves with specific geographic and other conditions of where they're flying (such as potential radio frequency confusion in the Mat-Su) and pilots should always file flight plans. Further, if you are flying with extra passengers or gear, take the time to conduct careful weight and balance calculations prior to loading to avoid an aft-center-of-gravity situation on takeoff.

Perhaps the most important thing any Alaskan pilot should do, however, is upgrade to a 406 MHz ELT. It certainly doesn't hurt to carry a back-up locator beacon but the 406 MHz ELT is the most significant piece of equipment to have onboard and will substantially speed up search and rescue efforts to a downed aircraft's location. It can quite literally be the difference between life and death for you and your passengers. (For more on the benefits of the 406 MHz beacon versus the older 121.5 Mhz beacon see this table.)

The terrible Soldotna crash has rightfully garnered a great deal of statewide and national attention due to the 10 deaths. However, those who work in and enjoy Alaskan aviation are well aware that every accident is major to the people involved and their loved ones. A single pilot fatality is one too many and as the summer continues, an emphasis on making wise choices and avoiding tragic mistakes can't be overemphasized.

But who is a bush pilot? What does bush pilot flying involve? There's not a lot of consensus about what a bush pilot does, except that he or she navigates Alaska's wild and roadless geography. A cover story in last month's Flight Training magazine continues the tradition of romancing the bush and even acknowledges some of the hard truths of flying off the grid.

In "ALASKA: The Ultimate Flight Training Environment," Kathy Dondzila writes of "flying with Bush Pilots above the Arctic Circle" with Kingdom Air Corps, at the Brooks Range Bible Camp 37 miles north of Bettles. Kingdom Air Corps is not a flight school but offers aviation-themed summer Bible camps to children and training for pilot-certified missionaries on how to operate in a "Bush environment." Kingdom isn't alone; Alaska Cub Training Specialists in Wasilla offers pilots a "bush checkout" along with formation flight opportunities through a variety of Bush Alaska-themed trips. Each company emphasizes off-airport landing, mountainous terrain and operating outside more familiar aviation environments.

Dondzila on the barebones nature of such flying:

The splendor of the wilderness is matched with challenges. Weather information is scarce, aircraft need to be maintained with minimal equipment, fuel is carefully monitored, and mountain flying knowledge is crucial. The nearest source for weather information was Bettles. However, at our remote location we had no satellite phone and no cell service, so we could not call them for a briefing. While Alaska has 179 weather cams around the state, including one at Anaktuvuk Pass (an hour north, to which we flew several times), we could not access them, as we had no Internet. So, when weather was marginal, the chief pilot would take off in one of the smaller airplanes to take a look at the conditions. He would fly toward Bettles, if conditions allowed, contact Bettles 10 miles out for a briefing, and bring us back the report.

Bettles, population 15, is considered the entry point for Gates of the Arctic National Park in the Brooks Range. It is about 150 miles from Fairbanks, the nearest paved airport, and while it does offer many of the comforts of home (Dondzila gleefully mentions the welcome availability of Klondike Bars), it also is a place from another time. Flying here requires thinking beyond the obvious despite access to flight service and telephones. Bush pilots in Bettles and elsewhere, today, may also be mechanics, too.

Here's Dondzila:

The best bush pilots are also airframe and powerplant mechanics, able to fix squawks wherever they occur. Our Cessna 206, which had been working perfectly on arrival at camp, showed no manifold pressure on the second day. Fortunately, we had Dan Swenson, our chief mechanic, with us. Swenson saw that the copper tube had broken where the B-nut slides over the feral (a small metal ring placed on the end of the tube). In minutes, he was able to cut and reconnect the tubing with the tools available at camp. Sometimes it's not that easy, and another aircraft has to fly out to pick up or deliver a part. But in all cases, an A&P needs to be able to work in the location, weather, and circumstances where the airplane has landed -- and get the aircraft flying again.

While the days of carrying along a spare propeller are long gone, pilots in adverse and remote environments are indeed smart to become licensed mechanics. A true hallmark of today's bush pilot may then be do-it-yourself repair, regardless of location or circumstance. Search and rescue tech have come along way in Alaska and are getting better all the time, but the terrain and remoteness demand a command of the machine.
Bush pilots, regulation, frontier

When Harmon Helmericks wrote "The Last of the Bush Pilots," in 1969, he wasn't lamenting the death of any single individual, but rather the end of an era. Federal aviation regulations and safety standards have shifted the modern expectations for bush flying.

"For many pilots," writes Dondzila, "their dream job is that of a bush pilot -- the airborne cowboy who must land on gravel bars and slip through mountain passes."

In truth, no pilot, even in Alaska, must do these things, and even those who fly for lodges and operate in more remote locations, including gravel bars, make their decisions based on the use of 21st-century technology and real-time weather information. The days of risking your life to deliver vaccines are over.

But cowboys are to Alaskan pilots as the frontier is to Alaska; steadfastly evocative comparisons that show no signs of abating.

In the last several years, three novels have focused on a specific kind of teenage pain: that of having a parent who struggles with mental illness. This Is How I Find Her by Sara Polsky, A Blue So Dark by Holly Schindler, and White Lines by Jennifer Banash all give us teen protagonists trying to understand the destructive and dangerous behaviors of volatile, creative mothers who may be kind or cruel, depending on forces invisible even to them. These are powerful stories of daughters who have all been left to find their own way through the fits and starts of madness that fill their lives. They love their mothers as they believe they should, and they strive, as best they can, to protect them, either by covering up their behavior or keeping secrets about just how bad it has become. All three of these books explore the guilt and despair that result from a teenager's long overdue act of self-preservation, the personal fallout from the moment when the protagonist finally decides that her fate is separate from that of her mother's.

This Is How I Find Her opens when high school junior Sophie saves her mother's life after a prescription drug overdose. As the doctors take over and her mother faces weeks of inpatient treatment, Sophie turns to her long estranged aunt and uncle for safe harbor, but there is trouble there as well. Sophie and her cousin Leila were once close, but when Sophie's mother impetuously endangered their lives while behind the wheel of a car, Leila's mother cut off all contact. Sophie's aunt chose to guard herself and her family and, in doing so, left her niece behind to deal with the chaos.

Messy family relations are laid bare, revealing how wild and unpredictable a home can become while still remaining within the limits of the law. Sophie's mother, an accomplished artist, can control her mood swings with medication, but taking the pills mitigates the manic states she has come to rely upon as an artist. Her subsequent wild behavior and risk-taking drives everyone away. Sophie however, has nowhere to go and is left to act as caregiver. She sticks it out until the day her mother nearly dies and her inability to hold everything together can no longer be ignored.

Fifteen-year-old Aura Ambrose is in a similar situation in Holly Schindler's A Blue So Dark. Her mother suffers from schizophrenia, and Aura has been holding their lives together since her father moved out a couple of years ago. In one heartbreaking passage, Aura recalls a panicked phone call she made at age 12 from a soccer field, as her mother's delusions suddenly consumed her and she became convinced she was about to die:

But Dad didn't say, all worried, like I still expected him to, "I'll be right there." He just sighed, long and exasperated, right in my ear. Sighed so hard I could practically feel his breath, hot, coming through the phone. "Aura, I can't."

My whole body was thudding and was so scared, so scared, suddenly I was the one who was drowning. I can't. I can't. You're not really going to do this are you? Why are you going to let everything fall on my shoulders, heavy as every brick building in the whole world?

Aura's thoughts sum up the horrifying realization that any teen with a mentally ill parent must face. Her parents break up, and Aura handles it because she has no choice. She keeps things under control until her mother slips into a near catatonic state. That's when she reaches out to her long absent grandmother who comes to the rescue, while her father, now in another relationship, also steps up to provide some guidance. Schindler makes clear that while these adults knew Aura was given a burden much too great to bear, they chose to ignore what was happening. They didn't do anything until it was almost too late and, even then, only because the teenager was falling to pieces.

Jennifer Banash's White Lines focuses on a teen who thinks she has escaped a mother with a combination of borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, but finds herself still very much in the emotional grip of a parent she cannot let go.

Seventeen-year old Cat seems to be handling things just fine; she is out of her mother's house and her wealthy remarried father has set her up in her own apartment. With New York City at her fingertips and no rules to follow, she holds an enviable position in her social crowd as a "club kid." She and her friends have a job of sorts; they are paid by a local promoter to bring in a teen cliental to various clubs. Her group is comprised of overlooked, ignored, or desperate kids who nominally attend high school, engage in all manner of drug-fueled activity, link up with sexual partners on a whim, and basically have what appears to be a full-time good time. They are also the kind of kids who kill themselves or get killed while no one notices.

Smart and self-aware, Cat knows her lifestyle cannot last forever but she also doesn't know what to do instead, and she's terrified of what will happen if she stops acting like she has it all together. For her, the problem is learning how to care about anyone again after the years of unpredictable violent abuse at the hands of her predatory mother. Consider this thought:

Sometimes I think that's what life really is -- the passing of small hurts on to one another, those circular moments of daily abuse. You hurt me, I hurt you. Rinse and repeat.

For Cat, it is the near death of a friend that finally prompts her to realize how close to the precipice she has come. This is the moment when she makes the phone call to her father, when she acknowledges not only that she's not okay, but that no one with so much psychological damage can be okay. Thankfully, after passively watching on the sidelines for years, her father steps up, and Cat is on her way to discovering what a safe and happy home can be.

Statistics on children living in homes with mental illness are difficult to come by, although a 2007 issue of Social Work reported that five million children in the US have a parent with serious mental illness. In Canada, a 2009 national health survey found 12 percent of children under the age of 12 living in that country shared a home with a parent suffering from at least one mood, anxiety, or substance abuse disorder. Children must also deal with the secrecy that surrounds many mental disorders, and fear of what might happen to a family often prevents honest and open discussion of the issue. As the teenage protagonists of these three novels come to learn, however, staying in the sphere of the mentally ill means ceding control of nearly every aspect of their lives. That moment of realization -- when the teen asserts that the life she's been living is not okay -- makes for a triumphant reading experience. These books represent gritty teen drama at its finest; they are powerful stories that teach readers what it truly means to be a young adult.

As he recounts in the book, Schultz has flown both with pilots who were dedicated solely to moving him along the trail and also with Iditarod Air Force volunteers who picked him up along the way. Over the years, he has developed a unique appreciation for the intricacies of decision-making while flying in winter.

"I sometimes find myself stuck in a checkpoint, waiting for a change in the weather so the plane can leave," he writes. "There's a saying, 'When you have time to spare, go by air.' I used to be anxious when I was grounded by weather, thinking I was missing many opportunities. Although I agreed that the pilot knows best, often I'd try to persuade him to fly. Not a good idea."

In 1997, Schultz and Barry Stanley found themselves in Ptarmigan Valley, between the Rainy Pass and Rohn checkpoints. Stanley had towed Schultz out to the valley, snapping shots along the way, in a sled behind his snowmachine. Pilot Sam Maxwell planned to pick him up there later for Rohn. Unfortunately, the snow ended up being too deep for the Super Cub and Maxwell was quickly stuck in the fading daylight. The plane had to be dug out and the snow compacted to make a firmer runway for departure. In an experience shared by thousands of bush pilots and passengers back to the days of Crosson and Wien, the three men got to work until Maxwell and Schultz were in the air and Stanley "...fired up his snowmachine, ready to ride back home to the Rainy Pass Lodge."

The most compelling chapter by far is the author's recollection of surviving a plane crash in 1992. Along with pilot Chris McDonnell, Schultz was en route to the White Mountain checkpoint. According to the chapter entitled "My Life-and-Death Plane Crash," McDonnell decided to fly across Golovin Bay to avoid low clouds. They were approaching the village of Golovin as the visibility steadily decreased.

"We could only see a few hundred feet up the sides of the mountains near us," writes Schultz. "Chris felt it was a safer bet to follow the shore of the bay, where we could see willows and a few fish camp shacks along the shoreline. After a few minutes those willow and shacks were no longer there. Or were no longer visible. I don't know which."

The aircraft hit the ground with little warning and neither pilot nor passenger was able to recall how they exited the crumpled wreckage. Both men were seriously injured and it was several hours before anyone was able to reach them. Schultz writes powerfully of desperately working his handheld radio and finally making contact with Will Vacendak, a Bering Air pilot who came looking for their emergency locator transmitter. Vacendak stayed with him overhead on the radio until rescuers arrived on snowmachines. In the end, Schultz required multiple surgeries and it was clear both he and McDonnell were lucky to be alive.

"Our rescuers were astounded by what they saw of the plane. The landing gear was broken off, the propeller bent, the wings contorted -- one forward, one backward -- and the cockpit smashed. Richard Toymil described the scene later saying, 'The plane was all messed up. The windshield was broken, there was blood all over the dashboard, and there were bloody streaks where they crawled out'."

Schultz, of course, took pictures of the crash site before leaving the scene.

Many fans of the Iditarod are going to love "Chasing Dogs" for the intimate look it provides of the race and the many, many stunning photographs. But pilots should also seek it out for the rare glimpse it provides of yet another facet of the state's unique aviation environment. Schultz's recollection of the accident is particularly riveting and illustrates perfectly how important proper survival gear is for all Alaska aircraft. One expects to be dazzled by Jeff Schultz's pictures; the appeal of his text is a great surprise and something to share with pilots everywhere.

"Chasing Dogs" can be purchased at stores across Alaska and online via Jeff Schultz's website. For more information, wholesale purchasers can contact Taku Graphics.

As Heacox recounts through references to Muir's own works and the works of his biographers and contemporaries, the naturalist first visited Alaska in 1879. Arriving in Fort Wrangell, he set out by canoe with Tlingit guides and missionary Samuel Hall Young to visit the country and "to seek knowledge," as Young explained. What he found was something he did not know existed, a place of mystery and grace that defied all reason. The lure of the glaciers brought him back to Alaska two more times in the years that followed and heavily influenced his writings and activism. The glaciers were a powerful inspiration. Heacox writes:

Muir wanted to inspect every glacier, as if each were a book like the others, similar in general characteristics yet distinctive in its specifics. Some were a deep, compelling blue, others pale and white. Some were heavy with burden, others clean and gleaming. Some were steep and twisted and tortured by crevasses as they spilled down tight mountain valleys; others ran straight and on a gentle gradient that enabled them to wear few wrinkles, as if they'd had an easier life.

In his sketches and notes, Muir made it clear that Alaska's glaciers were simply unforgettable.

After a second trip in 1888, which gave him the adventure with a small dog that inspired the book "Stickeen," Muir returned to the Southeast again in 1899 as a member of the famous Harriman Expedition. It was this journey, in the company of men such as paleontologist William Dall, Forest and Stream editor George Bird Grinnell, photographer Edward Curtis, geologist G.K. Gilbert of the US Geological Survey and naturalist Burroughs -- among many other eminent scientists -- that Muir took special note of the retreat of Muir Glacier. As the group traveled throughout what became Glacier Bay National Park, Muir was reminded of what he had see decades before and how the terrain had changed. Most significantly, sharing his experiences inspired the future work of Gilbert whose landmark title "Glaciers and Glaciation" was published after the group returned from Alaska and included his thorough analysis of how climate, topography and motion affected glaciers. What Muir was imparting was the big picture that glaciers provided about the climate, and the stories their geology held about the Earth's past.

Heacox weaves Muir's journeys around stories about his life back in California, his marriage and fatherhood, the years spent cultivating a successful orchard and the growth of his conservationist career which culminated in meeting President Theodore Roosevelt and establishing Yosemite National Park. Alaska, though, always infused his writings and speeches and as the Last Frontier invaded the American imagination, Muir continued to stress its natural beauty over the more obvious draw of material wealth. In his final years, Heacox writes that Muir was driven to complete a manuscript that would capture what his Alaskan journeys had meant to him.

It was hard work, as always. How to capture Alaska without hyperbole and syrupy language [Robert Underwood] Johnson had criticized him for years before? He didn't have to say Alaska was magnificent; just say Alaska. The name itself was another language, another time, when risk was daily bread and he remembered drinking the cool air like water, and the glaciers--always the glaciers--grand rivers of ice that textured his mind with their crevasses and seracs. How frisky and rambunctious he'd been back then, forty-one going on fourteen, still boyish, a tramp, curious about everything, imaginative, free.

"Travels in Alaska" was completed just before Muir's death in 1914.

There are many layers to Muir's Alaskan experiences and Heacox is careful to consider all of them, from the inspiration it provided his future conservation work, to the struggle he felt between his love of the northern spaces and his wife and children back home. The author manages to take a highly revered figure and place him in the realm of wide-eyed tourist, show how he was as filled with wonder as any visitor upon first sighting the walls of ice. But as much as Heacox's eloquent words and poetic phrases carry readers along on historic adventures, he is also careful to emphasize the science at the root of Muir's travels. Nothing the naturalist did was casual and the author's attention to detail is equally filled with care. Alaskans will likely be particularly struck by the final chapter where Heacox recalls the work to federally protect Alaska's landscape in the years after Muir's death especially in Glacier Bay ("A Monstrous Proposition," according to the Juneau Daily Empire). The story comes full circle, not only for Muir but Heacox as well.

How then to save Alaska? Let it be, said many disciples of John Muir, a growing legion of young, environmentally aware Americans. Slow down. Go softly with an open heart. Stop calling it a frontier. The last frontier is not Alaska, outer space, the oceans, or the wonders of technology. It's open-mindedness. Honor the land and its first nation peoples, and their ability to acquire wisdom, sustenance, and happiness from the wild plants and animals around them. Learn through story. Sleep on the ground. Listen.

Supplemented with stunning archival photographs and a thorough set of endnotes, "John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire" is the best guide for such a trip and Heacox a literary companion that Muir would certainly endorse.

YA/General Interest: Ride will always be first, famous, and fascinating. With much of the book dwelling on her youth (she was an astronaut at 27), this is an excellent choice for teens.

Most recently, a group from Michigan recovered a B-25 that crashed near the Tanana River in 1969 while on a firefighting mission. The "Sandbar Mitchell" is now part of a longterm project to be completely refurbished and showcased in the proposed Warbirds of Glory Museum.

Author Nicholas Veronico, a past president of the Society of American History, appreciates the hunt for crashed and long-forgotten military aircraft more than most and takes readers deep into the "epic stories of finding, recovering and rebuilding WWII's lost aircraft" around the world in his recent book "Hidden Warbirds." Heavily illustrated with color photographs and handsomely designed in a sturdy hardcover with glossy pages, Veronico's book shares tales of a variety of aircraft discovered in a multitude of locations, including an SB2U-2 Vindicator dive bomber recovered from Lake Michigan, a B-17E in Papua New Guinea, B-29s in California, and a P-51 Mustang in someone's garage. Really.

There is an entire section on the "Frozen North" that includes a P-38 from Greenland and the famous B-26 "Million Dollar Valley" Marauders that crashed in 1942 while en route from Edmonton to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and ultimately Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Alaskans will take special note though of the chapter on two B-24 Liberators. One of them remains on Atka Island, where it has rested since crashing in bad weather in 1942. That aircraft has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is under the jurisdiction of the Aleutian Islands National Wildlife Refuge; access to the site is restricted. According to Veronico, it is one of the only nearly intact B-24s in the world still in place at its wartime crash site.

The second Alaskan B-24, an LB-30 Liberator, flew with the Royal Air Force during World War II. It was purchased by the Morrison-Knudsen Company in 1951 and given the civilian tail number N68735. The company was very active in Alaska during WWII and is responsible for constructing numerous airfields in the state, as well as many other huge projects around the world including the Hoover Dam, the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy and portions of the Alaska pipeline.

The Morrison-Knudsen Company used the B-24 to transport men and supplies during construction of the Distant Early Warning Line during the early 1950s. After sliding off the runway in Wales ( on the tip of the Seward Peninsula northwest of Nome), the aircraft was repaired and the tail number changed again, to N92MK. According to Veronico, in 1958, N92MK landed short at the small airport at Kalikaket Creek -- misidentified in the book as "Kilikat Creek" -- on the ridge about 20-30 miles south of Galena.

Kalikaket was a "White Alice" site used by the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War. It was connected to the DEW Line but eventually, like the rest of the system, became obsolete with the advent of satellite communications. When N92MK crashed at Kalikaket, with no reported fatalities, it was deemed too costly to repair. The avionics were removed and the wreckage was moved off the runway. It remained there for more than 30 years.

In 1990, with the price of warbirds skyrocketing, the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum recovered the bomber and placed it up for sale, It was purchased by Lone Star Flight Museum in Texas who transported it to Fort Collins, Colo., where it was placed in outside storage. In 2001,Veronico reports, it was sold -- still in pieces -- to World Jet, a company known to buy and sell warbirds for decades. N92MK has not received much attention however and is, reportedly, still in that same yard in Fort Collins. Veronico includes a photo of what is left, after so many pieces have been lost along the way.

There are other references to Alaska within "Hidden Warbirds," including an interesting note in a chapter about a Navy Harpoon bomber that was purchased by Everts Air Cargo in Fairbanks.

"The Company," writes Veronico, "wanted the Harpoon and its spares primarily for the R-2800 engines, which it needed for its fleet of Curtiss C-46 Commandos." He notes that Everts did take possession of the aircraft's engines and the spares but never returned for the Harpoon itself. After 16 years, Everts was told to remove the fuselage or it would be scrapped. They ended up donating it to the Stockton Field Aviation Museum in California who took possession and removed it just ahead of an October 2010 deadline.

In many ways, "Hidden Warbirds" is a treasure hunt for adults; a delightful way to enjoy the magic of finding and recovering increasingly rare pieces of aviation history. Not everyone has the money or expertise to actively participate in such adventures, but Veronico has done an excellent job of placing readers right on the ground with those who do recover these planes and with many of them in such remote locations, the tales are quite epic.

Finally, "Hidden Warbirds" includes an extensive bibliography and list of internet resources on aviation archeology. Veronico also discusses recent finds and those "still out there" in his epilogue.

(Did I just write "colorful"? Please forgive me. I need to turn in my proof of Alaska residency right now before a reality TV producer calls and asks if I can recommend anyone for a new show.)

The plot is straightforward: Former bad boy Clive McCahon is on his way home to Cold Storage after serving seven years in prison Outside for dealing cocaine. He smartly put some money away before his arrest and now recovers it, believing that by keeping his mouth shut and protecting his employers he has earned some goodwill. Along with newly acquired former guard dog "Little Brother," he sews his cash into his new parka and heads north.

Once Clive reaches Juneau, Straley starts to have a lot of fun with the Alaska way of life. Consider how he describes the flight out of Juneau in a de Havilland Beaver, which begins with the words no passenger ever wants to hear: "We're going to give a try!" After stopping in Pelican, where the pilot unwisely chooses to take on a salmon wrapped in a garbage bag and shoves it under his seat, things take a bit of a negative turn. It should be noted that Little Brother is not in an FAA-approved kennel, because, well, if you've flown in Alaska then you know why:

"Is there a problem?" Tommy yelled over his shoulder.

Tommy started pumping the flaps and leveling off for a landing but hundred dollar bills were floating up over his shoulder and landing in his lap. He pushed the plane down on the water. Feathers and paper money fluttered through the cabin. The dog snarled, Tommy shrieked and Clive closed his eyes.

That is, of course, what we call an uneventful landing in the Last Frontier.

After safely arriving, Clive sets out to reestablish himself with his war-hero brother Miles, now the town's physician's assistant and sole medical representative. In a fit of civic improvement, he also starts working on a new bar/church -- there must be an equal number of bars and churches in the community, per town ordinance. In the meantime, Straley makes his way around Cold Storage, introducing all the regular characters, from the bored -- and randy -- married school teacher to the completely devoid of humor -- and humanity -- Alaska State Trooper and most warmly, the much-beloved young resident whose religious conversion has led him to set off in a kayak for Seattle and a meeting with the visiting Dalai Lama. The fact that his salvation arrives via cruise ship is a stroke of literary genius.

Clive's money ends up causing some problems, and guns and violence arrive in Cold Storage, although even then the laughs keep coming. But what impressed me the most about what Straley has done here is that unlike so many of the ways that Alaskans are portrayed these days, he writes his characters as colorful and idiosyncratic but also kind, smart and deeply moving. Yes, they live in a place that breeds a bit of zaniness -- how could it not, when it rains all the damn time? -- but that doesn't make them something to be mocked. For all that, "Cold Storage, Alaska" is certainly a wild mystery in the vein of Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" years or all of Carl Hiaasen, it is just as much an homage to small towns and the people who fill them. What elevates Straley above so much of the competition is how very much he cares about the people and places he writes about. He gives us Alaska with heart, exposing his own deep love for the state in each and every hilarious word.

George Mann's intrepid steampunk "supernatural specialists" Sir Maurice Newbury and Miss Veronica Hobbes return in a quite diabolical serial killer investigation with The Executioner's Heart. The Newbury and Hobbes mysteries have always done a great job of showcasing both of its protagonists without leaving Hobbes in a subservient literary position, but this go-round is especially well done. Things get complicated quickly and all sorts of supporting characters step up to help unsort the web of clues and political intrigue the detectives uncover. At the center is still a killer who must be stopped and that, as usual, is where Newbury and Hobbes truly shine.

Newbury has some Holmesian issues to deal with and struggles with addiction that might strike a Baker Street chord. However, he also wrestles with the supernatural and is risking his life battling a spiritual entity on behalf of Hobbes' sister. The paranormal is to be expected of course, as this is an England where Queen Victoria is kept alive through machinery of a most unnatural kind, and don't even get me started on what our heroes find on display at the Crystal Palace exhibition.

But around all the wonderful world building is still murder and greed and lies. Bloody death is popping up all over the drawing rooms of London and the victims appear to be connected in only the most tenuous of ways. As Newbury and Hobbes get on the case, they find themselves considering some most unexpected suspects, and while the killer must be stopped, soon enough the killer is the least terrifying part of the plot. Readers in search of a modern take on classic adventure and Holmesian hijinks that move at a rapid pace will find The Executioner's Heart to be right up their alley. I don't know which one of these characters I love more, only that I heartily look forward to what happens with them next.

For a somewhat creepier detective novel, look no further than The Aylesford Skull by James P. Blaylock. Langdon St. Ives has anchored several Blaylock novellas, but this is his first full-length title. Now semi-retired and enjoying life in the country, in this go-round the intrepid detective is joined by his stalwart companions Tubby Frobisher and Jack Owlesby, a doctor from Edinburgh named Arthur Doyle, and a young former circus aerialist, Finn Conrad. The villain is, as usual, the nefarious Dr. Ignacio Narbondo although others scatter about. Most dangerously, there is the "Aylesford Skull," the ghost that comes with it and the paranormal nightmare that it is capable of unleashing.

I'd like to think that true Victorian England never looked so grim, except the grave robbing and serial murders that Blaylock describes are right out of late nineteenth-century London. Narbondo himself is so unsettling perhaps because his evil is so common and with his backstory fleshed out here (courtesy his mother), he becomes a villain that readers can understand although certainly never sympathize. (Which actually makes him a lot worse.)

In The Aylesford Skull, St. Ives faces down an attack on his family, the return of a "dead" friend, foes willing to shed the blood of anyone in order to increase their personal power and an increasingly insane Narbondo. There is also some fishing, bird watching, talk of elephants, a flying machine and pirates. Blaylock does his usual talented blend of fantastic and science-possible and the interplay between the supporting cast makes for a fast-paced plot. It's a dark tale that manages to be a fun read and happily, gives the author to space to indulge all of his literary whims with this always enjoyable character.

Charles de Lint's Jack in the Green, out this month from Subterranean Press, is a contemporary tale that transports Robin Hood and his Merry Men into the modern gang culture of the American southwest. Fans of de Lint will have some idea of what to expect here: teenagers trapped in grim circumstances who encounter elements of myth and folklore and embrace them to effect great personal change. This time the stakes are incredibly high but the legend is no slouch either and what happens to Maria when she spies old friend Luz breaking into a house with a new "gang" of her own is something magical.

Maria and Luz hoped to find some magic when they were young, and miraculously, it looks like it might have happened. Jack Green and his friends may not understand how things work in Santo del Vado Viejo, where the 66 Banda gang rules the streets and the cops are more concerned about protecting the gated communities, but standing up for the downtrodden is written into their DNA. Class consciousness is always part of de Lint's titles and it is front and center here as Green robs from the rich to help the poor. When Maria finds herself falling hard for the mysterious hero while getting caught in the middle of a turf war, de Lint raises the stakes and forces his characters into an impossible situation. Then he pulls it all out with the kind of ending readers have learned to expect. With such engaging young characters, a theme that will resonate with any teen reader and Robin Hood to boot, Jack in the Green (with illustrations by Charles Vess), is an excellent YA choice.

Unexpectedly, I found a thread of Nikola Tesla running through a couple of the books I read for this column. Tesla is enjoying a renaissance these days and finding him in books for middle-grade and teen readers is an excellent way to build curiosity about this brilliant inventor.

Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab by "Science Bob" Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith is a throwback to classic 1950s style adventure stories (The Mad Scientists Club, anyone?). Siblings Nick and Tesla Holt have been sent for the summer to stay with their unorthodox Uncle Newt in Half Moon Bay while their scientist parents look into soybean growth in Uzbekistan. In short order they discover he is the very definition of eccentric, and while soaking in all the scientific awesomeness of his home lab (not to mention his home, period), the kids put together a fun rocket experiment and accidentally end up launching Tesla's necklace into the yard of the forbidding, sort-of-abandoned mansion down the street. The necklace must be retrieved, very big guard dogs thwarted, mysterious girl in the upstairs window rescued and lots of bad guys stopped. To accomplish all this, the brother and sister enlist the help of some bicycling neighborhood kids and more than a few things from Uncle Newt's basement. In the end a nefarious plot is stopped and the good guys win with lots of clues laid out for future adventures including figuring out just what Nick and Tesla's parents are really doing.

What elevates Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab above standard MG hijinks is the unique book design, which incorporates not only blueprints and schematics on every page but also illustrations throughout. On top of that, the authors include step-by-step instructions for every experiment that Nick and Tesla conduct so readers can give them a go as well. The directions are basic and easy to follow, the components accessible from your own home or local hardware store and the results a lot of fun -- rockets! "robo-cat dog distractor"! electromagnet! The narrative provides a standard page-turner but the experiments are an extra kick that shows the sort of fun that can be had when science leaves the lab. The second book in the series, Nick and Tesla's Robot Army Rampage, is out now and a third, Nick and Tesla's Secret Agent Gadget Battle, is due shortly.

Tesla's Attic by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elman is billed as a middle-grade title, but I think it actually works best for teens. The only thing it is missing from standard YA fare is romance and frankly, sometimes teen readers don't want romance in their mystery-adventures. For those interested in what strange things could be lurking in an inherited house and how they tie into a potential "Men In Black" conspiracy, then, Tesla's Attic fits the bill. Make the heroes a smart and fearless group of Super 8 level teens who are not superpowered, not magical and not on the cusp of finding some mystical object that will make them superpowered or magical, and you have a great start to what is billed as the Accelerati Trilogy.

Fourteen-year-old Nick, his younger brother and father have moved into his great aunt's house large rambling Victorian house, which was left to them in her will. Still reeling from the recent death of his mother in a fire, Nick is struggling to hold his family together as they make their way in a new town, new school, and new family reality. Cleaning out the attic for a garage sale seems like a good idea, as Aunt Greta was knee-deep in a lot of who looks like junk. Unfortunately there are some bizarre side effects to the seemingly innocuous toasters, vacuums, tape recorders, and other items that make their way into the community at the surprisingly successful sale. After some strange occurrences at home, Nick realizes he has to get all the stuff back and enlists the help of some classmates who have been freaked out by their purchases. In the meantime, the group tries to figure out just how these things got to be so powerful and who might have built them.

Tesla fans will already know that there are plenty of connections between the inventor and Colorado, so the idea that he might have stashed a few things in an old friend's house for safekeeping is not beyond the realm of possibility. Just what the inventor was up to with all this stuff is another thing however, and when a group of deadly physicists appears who really wants the stuff, (and is willing to do whatever it takes to get it), then the stakes increase exponentially. It's one thing to save a neighbor from a wild toaster but quite another to face down folks who are as likely to kill you as negotiate. Nick has to get a grip on what he has unwittingly loosed on the town and also be mindful of his family, who don't know what's going on and are facing their own demons as well.

The chemistry between Nick and his friends, Mitch, Caitlin, and Vincent, is really fantastic. They are a complicated group, not all necessarily likable, and hiding their own secrets as most of us do. They come together first because of circumstance -- each has one of the attic objects -- but slowly, as they work on solving the mystery, they become friends. It's a lot of fun to see them form a team and the way Shusterman and Elfman have written them, as teenage "everymen," readers will easily be able to project themselves into the story. Tesla's Attic was a very fun read for me, one of the more engaging and surprising titles for teens I've come across in a while.

If these novels sound appealing then consider Elizabeth Rusch's picture book biography of Tesla, Electrical Wizard: How Nikola Tesla Lit Up the World. There is a wealth of information in here about Tesla's childhood, his emigration to the U.S. and his infamous problematic relationship with Thomas Edison. Rusch shows how he was thwarted more than once by people who doubted his ideas and eccentric thinking but never backed down. It's a very inspiring story, and Oliver Dominguez's full color illustrations bring to life the inventor and the times he lived in. While Electrical Wizard: How Nikola Tesla Lit Up the World was clearly published for elementary school-aged children, I would not hesitate to recommend it for older readers. This is a great literary dip into the waters of Tesla's life and not to be overlooked simply because it is a picture book. I relished every page.

COOL READ: While I have become quite accustomed to the Scientists in the Field series taking me to unexpected places in the company of interesting people, The Tapir Scientist: Saving South America's Largest Mammal by Sy Montgomery is a trip way off the tracks. Likely few readers will have ever come across a tapir, even in the local zoo, and books about them are few and far between. But Montgomery excels at trips into the unexpected corners of the wild and she succeeds brilliantly here, in the company of field scientist Pati Medici and her associates. Along with photographer Nic Bishop (familiar to readers of the series), Montgomery went into Brazil's wetland territory to find the tapir. In the midst of some serious insect attacks and heat that makes a Florida summer seem downright Arctic in comparison, Montgomery and Bishop were witness to the work of this dedicated group who are trying to save the tapirs and the forests that depend on them.

There are some fascinating facts here, such as that tapirs are most directly related to horses and rhinos and have changed little in the last 12 million years. The pictures are, as usual for the series, clear, compelling and dynamic. The Scientists in the Field books never get old and with its unique subject, The Tapir Scientist is one of my all-time favorite entries.

This is the final installment of the Bookslut in Training column. I hope you have enjoyed reading it every month as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I am still writing, still reviewing, and can be always found online at my website, chasingray.com, and via Twitter (@chasingray).

While the two protagonists and their families are quite engaging (Anne in particular is laboring under the tremendous pressure of a living with a hoarder and her coping mechanisms are wearing thin), it is the peek into the world of estate sales that initially drew me in. As Ryan explains in a brief afterword, garage sales are for things people want to give away while estate sales are about items that people keep until the end. These aren't castoffs but personal treasures, things with value to their deceased owners. So as buyers line up outside and then poke and prod their way through old photo albums, china and records, Anne and Lewis view the spectacle through very different lenses. For Lewis, this is his mother's business, but for Anne, it is a place to try and understand how things can matter so much, which of course brings the narrative back to her mother.

Because McNeil's visuals pack a punch all on their own, the depiction of Anne's struggling emotions and her overstuffed house are doubly effective. As her mother clings to deep meaning in the most average of items, and Lewis's mother methodically prices and sells everything that falls in her path, the emotional challenges for our protagonists mount. Add to this a potential connection between their two families, and the issues raised by life in a tired town and Bad Houses becomes an elegy for life in the post-economic boom. Every moment is gray and stark in Failin, Oregon, and Anne and Lewis are facing a future that either slides into the gray or pushes for something more. Ryan shows how hard it is to be the kind of brave they must be and in the process makes a very quiet story something truly special. Bad Houses is a standout and not to be missed.

In Little Fish, author and illustrator Ramsey Beyer shares her experiences of year she left her small Michigan town for art school in Baltimore. Taking full advantage of the graphic novel format, Beyer shares excerpts from the zines, blog entries, and offbeat lists she kept during that period and then complements them with a more conventionally illustrated story of the people she met and the things she did. This makes for a memoir that is equal parts Lynda Barry and Rookie magazine and should have great appeal for high school students contemplating that first move away from home.

Beyer gives her readers everything, from an inside look at her family and close childhood friends, to all the fears and trepidations she felt upon first arriving at school. There are good times with her roommates and new friends along with maximum stress as her classes kick into high gear. Everyone she meets is different from who she has always known, and yet when she goes back home, there are changes to consider there as well.

For anyone who has left home, Beyer's scrapbook will read as remarkably familiar but that does not mitigate its power or enjoyment. As she thinks about issues big and small (from cutting her hair to changing her major to dating a friend), the thoughtful and funny list-making continues. Little Fish is thus a unique guidebook and certainly a perfect gift for pending graduates.

Johnny Hiro is one of the funniest comic book characters out there and his latest title Johnny Hiro: The Skills to Pay the Bills depicts another outstanding series of escapades for Manhattan's favorite sushi chef. Author and illustrator Fred Chao clearly has a good time with his character and that enthusiasm is palpable on every page. Of course it helps that Johnny's adventures are a bit wilder than the standard twenty-something. For example, as Johnny navigates the insanity of his sushi job along with an unexpected run-in with his ex-girlfriend (while current girlfriend Mayumi stands by), suddenly King Kong arrives and he has to be the hero.

From conversations with Mayor Bloomberg about burying the King Kong appearance in a Hollywood filming story, to a major twenty-something identity crisis and the machinations of a sabotaging catering crew, Johnny always perseveres but it's never easy. The main point this go-round is deciding if he is indeed living the life he wants to live, in the place where he wants to live. These are universal questions and yet Chao fuels them with a lot of life and produces another volume in a continuing tale that is as delightful as it is original. Johnny has immense appeal.

Countering the can-do attitude of Kong fighting Johnny, Briony Hatch is a young girl who is more likely to read about her dreams then set out to live them. In their comic of the same name, author Penelope Skinner and illustrator Ginny Skinner take on an adolescent girl's longings to emulate her favorite fantasy hero (Starling Black) while tossing in a cranky ghost who will either set our heroine on the path to enlightenment or into a permanent bout of depression.

First, Briony is a rather unremarkable teenager. The most extraordinary thing about her is that she knows this, and embraces the fantasy life that reading the adventures of Starling Black gives her. The problem is that Starling Black is not giving Briony all the answers she needs anymore. She can't tell her what to do about her overwhelming sense of sorrow or the cantankerous elderly ghost who is squatting in her bedroom and demanding her pre-death slippers be found. Clearly, Briony has a mystery to solve, and until she does nothing is going to make sense.

Briony Hatch is a British publication and it carries a sly sense of humor that manages to be both sweet and poignant at the same time. Briony is quite appealing, and her struggle to find her way into being an extraordinary person (while simultaneously solving the ghost situation) is lovely to watch. The authors, sisters Ginny and Penelope Skinner, have created a powerful force for good in this character and given wallflowers everywhere someone to emulate.

Nonfiction lends itself particularly well to the graphic novel format, and there are two recent titles that prove this while tackling vastly different subjects. In Jonathan Fetter-Vorm's Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb and Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks's Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas, the science is solid, the history riveting, and the characters remarkably relatable despite their extraordinary lives.

Ottaviani has made a career out of writing graphic novels on science subjects and this time looks at three women who studied chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Goodall, Fossey, and Gladikas are excellent biographical subjects who possess surprising backstories, stupendous accomplishments, and all sorts of complications with their mentor, paleontologist, archaeologist, and anthropologist Louis Leakey. Ottaviani waded deeply through their writings to give readers a look at who they were before they departed on their wildlife adventures and then into the sharp learning curve they inhabited once they got into the field. These women rewrote all existing knowledge of primate science. So Ottaviani had a lot of good to work with in Primates; happily, he told a solid collective story to boot.

Beginning with Jane Goodall, the author links the stories of the young women through their meetings with Leakey and with each other. Wicks draws them, and their subjects, in a friendly, informal manner, making sure to include their particular characteristics such as Fossey's boots, Goodall's sneakers, and Galdikas's bare feet. Different fonts keep their thoughts separate even when they meet, and it is easy to follow the threads of each storyline. Primates is informative, engaging, and unexpectedly compelling. Beyond that, it was lovely to read about these women, these scientists, and see all that they overcame on the way to making history. They stopped the world in their own ways, and they made it start again with a whole new understanding.

On a very different topic and in a very different style, Trinity is a stark black-and-white exploration of not only the history of Manhattan Project but also how the development of the atomic bomb led to the Cold War and changed the way governments considered conflict and consequences. Fetter-Vorm is evenhanded in his consideration of the bombing of Japan, and makes clear that the race against Germany to understand and use atomic energy was critical to the free world. However, by focusing on the struggles of many of the scientists involved, most famously Robert Oppenheimer, the author makes this a heartfelt history of a deeply complicated topic. He makes readers understand how the bomb was built and tested and dropped, and he also makes them think about what building and testing and using it meant to the world. Trinity is a serious and powerful read; it's perfect for the classroom and a valuable title for teens and adults.

Finally, for young readers, SMASH: Trial of Fire by Chris Bolton (with art by Kyle Bolton) is a funny story with bright artwork and a nice wide size that early readers should enjoy exploring on their own.

In Andrew Ryan's world the Defender is the big (very Supermanish) hero, and Andrew really wishes he could be him. Our tiny hero has some bullying issues to sort out at school, his older brother is annoying to the extreme, and nobody understands him. Then, in the midst of an exceedingly crappy day, Andrew ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, like a lot of other future superheroes, and at the hands of a mad scientist villain ends up with all of Defender's powers. The problem is that while Andrew is capable of a lot of super things, he doesn't know how to do any of these things. Plus he's a kid, and this is one seriously steep learning curve.

SMASH has a lot of humor, especially of the eye-rolling Teen Titans kind. He's a good kid whose heart is in the right place, and if he can just figure out how not to fly into buildings, then he might save the day. Bolton makes Andrew extremely believable and lets him fulfill a few kid fantasies along with the more serious hero stuff. Kyle Bolton's artwork is perfect; the faces are very expressive, and he captures Andrew's alternately confident and overwhelmed expressions with aplomb. Elementary-schoolers are going to get a lot of joy out of this one, and I hope a sequel, set up by the final pages, will be released soon.

COOL READ: Mike Madrid (author of The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines) is back with a look at the golden age of comics with Divas, Dames & Daredevils. This is not only a very worthwhile and exceedingly interesting history of female characters from the 1940s, but it also includes a ton of comics themselves. Entire stories are reproduced here, all only a few pages long, exactly as they originally ran in anthologies of the period. Readers get to enjoy the exploits of such adventurers as "The Blonde Bomber," "Mysta of the Moon," "Lady Satan," and "Gale Allen and the Girl Squadron," who -- no joke -- "protected the planet Venus from all manner of evil alien races and one slimy, carnivorous monster after another."

In the midst of the sort of wild acrobatics and devastating punches that post-WWII comics are famous for, Madrid points out several subversive plots. In the section entitled "Daring Dames," he features Penny Wright, a newspaper reporter; Betty Bates, a lawyer; and Jill Trent, "Science Sleuth." Trent is notable not only for presenting "the proto girl geek of comics" who is dedicated to finding scientific solutions to crimes but also for her relationship with her assistant Daisy, as the two were sometimes shown sharing a bed (including in the issue in this collection). What's really surprising about their relationship is that it occurred at a time when heterosexual couples usually slept in twin beds à la Lucy and Desi, so Jill and Daisy were seriously ahead of the game in a lot of ways.

There's some expected racism in the comics, many of which were published during the war, so the Japanese and Germans are brutally depicted, and gender roles are often a bit much to take. When Pat Parker, "War Nurse" sneaks onto an aircraft to help fight the Germans over London, hero aviator Don Fraser threatens to spank her. "But Fraser has no time to spank Pat, for Von Ritter's stukas are circling over London..."

So are they dated? Well, yes, but that doesn't mitigate the comics' overall entertainment or the fascinating peek Divas, Dames & Daredevils gives us into mid-century pop culture. I'm pining for Mysta of the Moon who lived in her lunar science citadel and spread all of mankind's knowledge to the universe. I also wouldn't mind finding out how things turned out for Jill and Daisy or if Pat Parker ever turned the tables on Don and gave him the spanking he deserved...

When Annie Dillard writes, "Any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger," she means key lime pie. Which is dust, which is bone, which (according to Dillard) smells like pie. With which finger does the sacred wipe? Don't ask the key lime pie-lover. He works fast so he might deserve rest, reads hard so he might invent stories, beats his own time in one-man pie eating contests so citrus will make the gutters of his mouth sing. The finger that wipes his lips is his.

Now take a sigh and let all of those lovely words about pie float into your heart. What Lebo does is not only write about the virtues of using cold butter (repeated more than once); she also elevates her subject to the stuff of poetry. She gives us words that fit the wonderfulness we feel when the perfect piece of pumpkin or apple or raspberry pie graces our palates. And even more surprising, you will find not only Annie Dillard but also William Burroughs, Emerson, Muhammad Ali, and Isadora Duncan in the pages of this book about pie. It's a wonderful trick that Lebo has accomplished, creating a valuable cookbook that is a marvel to read. I don't care how old (or young) you are, lines like this cannot be resisted: "If you love peanut butter pie, you are either Dolly Parton or someone who loves her." Home economics would still be in every high school in America if the reading list included titles like A Commonplace Book of Pie, and we would all be much better for it.

Jeff VanderMeer takes the traditional writing guide and turns it on its head with Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. This full-color, slightly oversized title takes readers through topics of inspiration and creativity into more toolbox-oriented discussions of character development, plotting, and world-building. He also uses the development of his own work to explicitly show how stories change from draft to final copy while also looking at the structure of other stories, such as Ian Banks's "Use of Weapons" and Angela Carter's "The Fall River Axe Murders."

Wonderbook really sings when it comes to the design. The information is solid and engaging but the many, many illustrations, which include everything from original artwork (courtesy of artist Jeremy Zerfoss) to maps to photographs are stunning. The book is a feast for the eyes and with its glossy paper and variety of fonts, sidebars, and informative graphics, it draws readers in with every turn of the page.

The author wisely includes the thoughts of other writers here, from Neil Gaiman's essay on "The Beginning of American Gods" to personal pieces from Nnedi Okorafor, Catherynne Valente, Karen Joy Fowler, Charles Yu, Joe Abercrombie, and more. The variety of his contributors, both in their works, gender and ethnicities, is refreshing. There is something here for everyone, and many young writers will likely find authors to emulate and read up on within the book's pages. (George R. R. Martin fans should take note of an exceptionally long and interesting interview between him and VanderMeer on the "craft of writing.")

VanderMeer, Zerfoss, and designer John Coulthart have created something very appealing with this presentation and because of that Wonderbook should have high teen appeal, and be a go-to title for both high school and college classrooms; homeschoolers also need to take note.

Artist and visual essayist Debbie Millman plays a lot with words and design in her oversized collection Self-Portrait as Your Traitor. This book brought to mind the journalistic compulsions of my youth, when I felt like I had to get down on paper -- in one way or another -- all the feelings that threatened to otherwise overwhelm me. Millman is much more sophisticated than I was at sixteen, but the raw emotion is the same; these are the poems, stories, and thoughts she must share with the world. For readers, it's a chance to peek into a unique mind, and be alternately amused and shocked by what we find there.

So what do you read about in Self-Portrait as Your Traitor? How about a young girl's appreciation for a trinket as she battles a monster; a recollection of a first job out of college that encapsulates everything from the first brush of professional giddiness to an almost inevitable soul-destroying lack of self-confidence. There's even a peek at the lives of adults from the perspective of the child who hears everything and remembers it well into her own adulthood. (Is it a cautionary tale to know that we all end up sounding like our mothers at some point?)

Self-Portrait as Your Traitor is for older teens, for those with a jaundiced eye fixed on the world around them, for those who are sometimes angry and don't know why but feel that way just the same. Millman uses large fonts, varied backgrounds, and a lot of other techniques to make the book as intriguing to gaze at as to read. It won't fit in a backpack but will demand attention on the shelf and likely prompt a few journal entries in response to the author's passionate prose.

While reading all of these books, the appeal of good graphic design will become obvious and that is when teens will want to take a look at Chip Kidd's Go: A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design. Kidd, whose book covers are instantly recognizable (see his Book One: Work: 1986-2006), has put together a basic study of the subject and provides readers with not only examples of how design can be improved (covers with more or less color, etc.) but also a series of "assignments" to spur creativity. There are chapters on typography, content and form, considerations of pattern, light, and image cropping, and a nice introduction to concept. Essentially, Kidd is inviting kids to think beyond design as something to look at and instead think about how it comes to exist in the first place.

Go is an obvious choice for classrooms involved in yearbook or campus newspaper and website design, but it will be of great use to anyone over twelve interested in a creative field. Kudos to the author (and publisher) for bringing this adult subject to a younger audience that will find much to learn from the bright and inviting layout.

Finally, photo collector Josh Sapan shares some very cool, and often unexpected, oversized panoramic group photographs in The Big Picture. This black-and-white collection has a bit for everyone: the Army-Navy game from 1916, the Miss America Pageant in 1926, and a beautiful double-page spread of the Yale crew team from 1910. The National American Women Suffrage Association in St. Louis is suitably serious in 1919 and the crowd welcoming Henry Flagler on the first train to Key West in 1912 is appropriately huge. But what really stays with you as you browse the pages (and read very brief essays by the likes of Anna Quindlen, Mark Halperin, and Yogi Berra) is how much of our country's history is captured in these group shots. Far less stiff than posed studio portraits, these are Americans at work and play, dressed in the clothes they were most themselves in, engaged in the activities that dominated their waking hours. Here is our American history, endlessly fascinating and so worthy of our attention.

COOL READ: Enchanted Lion Books has published another charmer from French illustrator Blexbolex that carries a deep and unexpected story. Ballad is designed as one of those short, "chunky" hardcover books (not unlike a board book in size) that initially tells a short story about walking home from school. In spare words on each page, the reader makes the journey from school to home, but with each succeeding chapter (only a few pages long), the journey becomes more perilous and intense. Bandits, magic spells, a witch, a curse, soldiers, war! Your standard walk home becomes a trip that sees the whole nation in peril and if the stranger does not save the day (a cavern! a dragon! a duel!), then all will be lost.

Ballad is exactly what the title suggests -- a classic storytelling saga that builds on simple components to construct a stirring tale. The artwork is colorful and expressive, the lettering precise and elegant and the entire adventure both a witty delight for children and teens. Would-be graphic designers will also find something to enjoy here, as Ballad's design is truly exceptional.