"Reader beware: Fradkin's history of sinisterly beautiful Lituya Bay is to Alaska travelogues as Kubrick's The Shining is to hotel commercials. After finishing this unnerving tale of Tlingit monsters, kilometer-high waves, mystery bears and inexplicable murders, I looked under my bed to make sure the Land Otter Man wasn't lurking there. A gothic tour de force by America's finest environmental journalist."--Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear: Los Angles and the Imagination of Disaster and City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angles

"Philip Fradkin is a master storyteller--and his stories are full of adventure, primordial beauty, violence, and dread. He tells stories of places as well as people, and especially of the power of wild, archaic nature to disrupt or even destroy our power-hungry civilization. His is a compelling voice, warning us never to take the earth and its elemental forces for granted."--Donald Worster, author of Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West

"A first-rate piece of travel literature. Nothing that I have read so captures the restless, violent, somber history of this area, from so many perspectives and with such energy and zest. Fradkin draws upon history, ethnology, ethnohistory, and the natural sciences, and creates literature--being personal, opinionated, and readable, all in the best traditions of travel writing."--Malcolm Margolin, Publisher, Heyday Books