Crossing the Water: The Alaska-Hawaii Trilogies (Paperback, New)

Although Alaska and Hawaii have both been official states of the United States of

America for fifty years, they are still looked at as remote and mysterious and slightly

dangerous. Irving Warner has lived in both states, and his fiction reflects not only his

deep understanding of these places but also his sincere love and respect for them. In

these remarkable stories, Warner introduces his readers to these very different lands and

to the very unique people who live there. Warner's previous works have included, among

other works, In Memory of Hawks: Stories from Alaska about which Janet Ross of Library

Journal wrote, "If one were to combine the creative genes of Ernest Hemingway and John

Steinbeck, the result might just be Warner" and The War Journal of Lila Ann Smith

which reveals Warner's fascination not only with Alaska but also with the entire Pacific

Rim, in this case, the Aleutian Islands.

In the Alaska segment of these current stories, "The Lost River Trilogy," Warner focuses

on the cold and loneliness of remote Alaska villages, creating stories which all take place

around the Lost River road. He writes about the passions that isolation and weather can

bring out in human beings, passions which are powerful and sometimes fatal. The mythos

between life and afterlife is woven into each story. This elevates them to a larger individual

statement, but the three together becomes a forceful vision of that enigmatic zone

between life and death. In his "Hawaiian Island Trilogy," he looks at a different kind of

mythos the often ethereal dimension of time. In one unforgettable story, he tells about

Old Okata. He is a nine-decades-oldformer sugar plantation worker, a Japanese-Hawaiian

who seems to be losing his bearings along the time-line that has brought him into postplantation

Hawaii--, the world of the 21st century.

Reading these two trilogies and the mediating "bridge story" that connects them, one

discovers not only two of the least populated yet most visited regions of the United

States, but also how the people of these regions natives and tourists alike have learned

to adapt to their environments. More importantly, one learns something about oneself

because Warner writes of the human condition, of the deep connections we have for people

throughout our country, throughout our world.