The $30 million toe in the water

Historian David Reamer shares a curated list of unconventional Alaska history books for summer reading, featuring works like a Japanese artist's prints from his cannery days and a construction worker's rhyming memoirs that capture the raw, often profane, realities of midcentury Alaska.

Beaches, airports, and cafes, long lines and longer days, the season ritually demands offerings of books. Summer reading lists are a hallowed publishing tradition, delving into every genre along the full range of light to heavy fare.

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This list is something different, both more difficult and original. This is a personal list of the more obscure, occasionally profane, and entirely odd Alaska history books that I will be reading and rereading this summer, each of them a highly recommended experience.

The opener is as much aspirational as anything else. However, that is a situation I plan to remedy, hopefully beginning as soon as this summer.

Who is the unnamed buyer?

Sumio Kawakami (1895-1972), also known as Chosei Kawakami, was a Japanese artist best known for his printmaking. However, a life is never a single thing. He traveled in his younger years ,with a 1917 to 1918 stint in the United States.

His stretch in America included some time working at an Alaska cannery, a brief tenure that yet proved inspirational. This is 'Alaska Story,' the 10th volume in his complete works series, which reprints pieces published or created between 1949 and 1972.

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And yes, it is in Japanese, which I need to learn. Nonetheless, the book is well worth a search on its images alone. His Alaska prints are striking, both universal and singular, rich in that familir awe but captured with a more unique palette.

There are pinks and yellows, aquamarine tones abutting more familiar browns and greens. It is a slightly different perspective and all the more appreciated for it.

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If this seems interesting, the reader might also enjoy any of Dale DeArmond's printmaking oeuvre, particularly her 1973 'Juneau: A Book of Woodcuts.'

The 1940s to 1950s construction boom, prompted by a steep, sheer incline of federal investment in the territory, transformed broad swaths of Alaska.

From 1925 to 1940, there was a single, solitary permanent military outpost in all of Alaska. And no offense intended toward Haines, but this fort was all the way over at Haines, referring to .

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Beginning in 1940, it was as if legions of government agencies all at once recalled the existence of Alaska, including that year's establishment of Fort Richardson at Anchorage.

The territory's proximity to the Soviet Union and subsequent onset of the Cold War furthered this interest. The waves of incoming soldiers, scientists and technicians required a concurrent influx of construction workers, all the better to provide the necessary and previously nonexistent military, research and housing facilities.

Drawn by high wages and demand, these construction workers arrived in Alaska and quickly formed their own opinions about this great land.

Luckily for me, one of them put his thoughts down in verse. In 1956, William E. 'Hiblade Bill' Johnson published 'Alaska Through the Rhymes of a Construction Stiff.'