Northern Flights

The opening chapter in this memoir of a bush pilot's life in southeast Alaska grabs the reader's attention with the account of a hair-raising flight in a small plane. But the sense of immediacy and excitement is not sustained as Bruder switches by chapter's end from the present tense to the past, which he alternates with a fuzzy conditional throughout the rest of the book. Apart from his arrival in Ketchikan in 1971, it is hard to pinpoint exactly when all the action takes place. For a journalist (he was a reporter for various magazines and newspapers, including the Anchorage Times ), Bruder is noticeably vague as to dates and chronologies, and his work suffers for it. Despite the shortcomings, there is enough here to pique the interest of armchair adventurers: Bruder loves Alaska and flying, and does a serviceable job of describing his breathtaking surroundings, the wolves, killer whales and rugged lumberjacks, and his daring airborne exploits. (September)