Reviews of The Stars, The Snow, The Fire

“The Haines memoir comes out of a quarter of a century spent in a cabin on a homestead amid the tundra meadows and taiga in the hills 60 miles up the Tanana River from Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a place and a life in which essentials ruled, an existence as near to that half-mythic thing we celebrate as the ‘frontier experience’ as could be found anywhere in the 20th century. Haines was a trapper and a hunter, cutting trails into the wilderness, building trapline cabins in which to hole up, selling pelts he had cured himself from animals he had skinned himself, eating the meat he shot, his human contacts so rare that every encounter and every conversation could be remembered in exquisite detail. . . . Haines is a poet who crafts each sentence piece by piece as if he were building a harpsichord—slowly, carefully, each word examined meticulously for rightness before being slid into place.” —Washington Post Book World

“Such a life may not be possible again. So it is good that a writer of Mr. Haines’s rare vision and poetic eloquence lived this life, and good that he has shared it.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An invaluable addition to American literature.” —Booklist, starred review