BiblioVault - Books about Boots

Alaska Eskimo Footwear

Jill Oakes and Rick Riewe

University of Alaska Press, 2006

Alaska Eskimo Footwear celebrates the incredible beauty and spiritual significance of the shoes and boots worn by Alaska Native peoples. Stunning photography brings the harsh and striking environment of the North alive and demonstrates how essential footwear was to native survival, while Eskimo seamstresses, dancers, and hunters explain the symbolic meaning of their traditional patterns and decorative details. This full-color volume features photographs from museum collections in Canada, the United States, and Russia, as contributors from each major Alaska Eskimo group—Inupiaq, Yup’ik, Alutiiq, and St. Lawrence Islander—discuss skin preparation, boot construction, and decoration. A tribute to exquisite art and the women who practice it, Alaska Eskimo Footwear brings the beauty of the North—and its traditional wares—to life.

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Boots, Bikes, and Bombers

Adventures of Alaska Conservationist Ginny Hill Wood

Edited by Karen Brewster

University of Alaska Press, 2012

Boots, Bikes, and Bombers presents an intimate oral history of Ginny Hill Wood, a pioneering Alaska conservationist and outdoorswoman. Born in Washington in 1917, Wood served as a Women’s Airforce Service Pilot in World War II, and flew a military surplus airplane to Alaska in 1946. Settling in Fairbanks, she went on to co-found Camp Denali, Alaska’s first wilderness ecotourism lodge; helped start the Alaska Conservation Society, the state’s first environmental organization; and applied her love of the outdoors to her work as a backcountry guide and an advocate for trail construction and preservation.

An innovative and collaborative life history, Boots, Bikes, and Bombers, incorporates the story of friendship between the author and subject. The resulting book is a valuable contribution to the history of Alaska as well as a testament to the joys of living a life full of passion and adventure.

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Traces of Boots on Tongue

and Other Stories

Rajkamal Chaudhary

Seagull Books, 2023

A literary glimpse into the early decades of independent India.

Drawing influences from Indian folktales, French existentialism, and the Bengali Hungryalist movement, Rajkamal Chaudhary’s œuvre is like a secret back alley in an old city—not completely forgotten but existing only for the few. Even though Chaudhary also wrote in Maithili and Bengali, it was his writings in Hindi that established him as the bold new experimentalist of Indian literature. His India of the 1950 and 60s is populated with hopeless literature professors, scattered alcohol bottles, prostitutes, hysteria patients, and sell-out painters. His unconventional life and writing place him outside the mainstream, and so he remains as uncategorizable as the characters and lives he wrote about. Bringing together twelve of his most representative short stories, translated for the first time in English, Traces of Boots on Tongue and Other Stories allows a glimpse into the early decades of independent India and its weariness, which many readers will find in today’s India as well.

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