04/08/2019
In this detailed, sometimes poetic exploration of the Bering Strait, Demuth, an environmental historian at Brown University, reveals the area is not, as people sometimes imagine, a “beautiful but essentially static place... untouched by people.” While tracing the life cycles of wild animals there, including foxes, walruses, and whales, she also moves across the Chukchi and Seward peninsulas in Russia and Alaska, respectively, tracking the lives of their human inhabitants. Throughout, Demuth emphasizes the Bering Strait as a point of intersection between the human and natural worlds. Early chapters, for example, deal with how, in the 19th century, the blubber of bowhead whales “lubricated a mechanizing country: first, greasing sewing machines and clocks, and then the cotton gin and power looms.” Subsequent discussions focus on the Beringian land itself—“too cold for corn, or wheat, or even, in most places, potatoes”—and the reindeer that thrived there. Later sections on how the early 20th-century gold rush in Nome, Alaska, attracted hopefuls from around the world prove equally fascinating. They speak to the complexity of the area in general and to its fascinating legacy, a history Demuth’s authoritative chronicle conveys with both insight and, in an era of climatic peril, urgency. With 18 photos and 7 maps. (Aug.)
"[Floating Coast ] is a deeply studied, deeply felt book that lays out a devastating but complex history of change, notes what faces us now, and dares us to imagine better."
NPR - Genevieve Valentine
"This book has much to offer. No matter its subject in any given paragraph… Floating Coast is rich, well researched and illuminating. It keeps under readers’ feet the vastness of Demuth’s expertise, as solid as a land bridge. She has made it her life’s work to learn about Beringia. In relaying her knowledge, she provides a vision not only of where we on this continent came from but where we are headed. We study the Bering Strait to learn what the future holds."
"Floating Coast is an extraordinary piece of history writing."
"Though Floating Coast is billed as an environmental history, it could also be described as a meditation on a biosphere. Demuth includes lavish descriptions of the landscape she has been admiring since she first visited as a teenager.… Demuth’s passion for her subject shines through on every page, and her account is enriched by her extensive personal experience in Beringia. Rather than treating the Arctic as a plein-air museum, she shows how death and destruction are essential aspects of life."
New York Review of Books - Sophie Pinkham
"Floating Coast is a historian’s Moby-Dick , a great white whale of a book that spans centuries and links landscapes, living beings, and the flux of time into a marvelously readable narrative."
"Floating Coast is an extraordinary piece of history writing, seamlessly weaving together disparate elements. It is astonishingly rich in ethnographic detail, ecological precision, economic circumstance and historical texture. Most illuminating and original is Demuth’s focus on the circulation of matter—in flesh, on hoof, inside fur and hide, and in buried minerals."
"Brilliant, compelling, and beautifully executed… Demuth writes with the poetry and wisdom of the land and the sea, drawing the human-wrought past of a faraway place close to the lives and future of us all."
"Bathsheba Demuth’s history flows as richly and fluidly as Arctic waters. As she tracks the dynamics of the modernist ecological makeover of the Bering Strait, Demuth is inventing a new form of historical narrative."
"A poetic meditation on the devastations of modernity in the sea, on terra firma, and, eventually, belowground. Whale hunters and reindeer herders, greedy capitalists and utopian planners, hopeful prospectors and raw-material-hungry government bureaucrats appear on the stage in this analytically powerful book, a monument to a people and their land just as much as an allegory of the world we have created."
"This book has unsettled me like no other I’ve recently read…[Floating Coast ] is brilliant."
Literary Hub - Lucy Kogler
"This first-ever popular history of the Bering Strait poses questions that will only grow more important in a warming climate: it explores how animals, plants, natural landscapes, and human beings responded as capitalism and communism demanded that they serve ideas of human progress. Demuth’s research in Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi communities shows care and rigor, but it is the poetry of her writing that tends to come up first in recommendations and reviews."
"With her pleasing prose, relentless research, and profound sense of place, Bathsheba Demuth does elegant justice to the social and environmental revolutions that define the modern history of Beringia, and to the stories of indigenous communities and diverse newcomers, of gold rush and gulag, of whales and caribou."
"A brilliant hybrid…Often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision."
"In a time when human desire bends so very much of what it encounters to its own image, Bathsheba Demuth's debut encourages us to think about the very physical limits of such a proposition. Easily one of the most innovative and poetic natural histories I have read in years."
★ 2019-08-03
The peoples of Beringia are many, writes Demuth (Environmental History/Brown Univ.), but ultimately, they divide into Natives—the Iñupiaq, Chukchi, Yupik, and so on—and foreigners, who number everyone else. Those foreigners—Russians, British explorers, and Yankee whalers—fundamentally altered the environment of the region in a fairly short time. If, as the author notes, Natives and foreigners alike went in search of whales as a source of sustenance, they did so with different ideas of what to do with their prize. Apparently influenced by students of Howard Odum, Demuth writes of energy flows across the region. "To be alive," she writes, "is to take a place in a chain of conversions." The seas surrounding the Bering Straits are among the most productive ecosystems on the planet, and "human life in Beringia was shaped, in part, by the ways energy moved over the land and through the sea." Many of those ways were purely extractive, as energy sources, from ambergris to oil, were located and taken away, a process against which Native people and some foreigners militated. One of Demuth's great contributions is her exploration of the radical history of labor in the remote regions, a history soon supplanted by corporate capitalism on one shore and the gulag on the other, even as new arrivals concentrated their efforts on "liberating energy." Now, she writes, a new chapter in Beringian history is being composed with climate change, a transformation that led one elder to observe that "foreigners had brought the end of a world to his people a century ago." The far north has inspired a remarkable body of literature, highlighted, in recent years, by Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams and Lawrence Millman's At the End of the World . Demuth's book, based on years of field research and comprehensive study, easily takes its place alongside them.
A superb book, essential reading for students of the once-and-future Arctic.
