Red Summer: The Danger, Madness, and Exaltation of Salmon Fishing in a Remote Alaskan Village

by Bill Carter

Book Overview

A vivid, unforgettable account of the danger, pain, and joy of working on a salmon fishing boat and living in a small village on the farthest edge of Alaska. Set in the tiny Native village of Egegik... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743297067
• ISBN13: 9780743297066
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 234 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Red Summer: A Working Man's Review !!!!

Buy this book immediately for your father. Much of America is based not in cities but in small rural communities where a man or woman's value is not measured in dollars and cents but in how hard that individual works. These are the backbone of America that split their own firewood to heat their home. Yes...the people that rototill, fertilize, and plant their own gardens for food. Young and old the people that conduct hard, brutal, day in day out physical labor. This book is the bible of those of us who work that hard. If you are a fan of the "Deadliest Catch" you will love this book. However unlike the "Deadliest Catch" this book is written by the individual that actually does the hard work...While this mind numbing labor takes place in just a few months it feeds families for an entire year. Add to this diary of back breaking fishing extremely insightful passages on the working man's view of the Green movement and global warming and you have a winner. When I purchased this book it was a classic case of don't judge a book by it's cover...This book is a keeper!!! Every book that I buy is passed on to others at some point...this book will be handed down to my daughters to be handed down to their daughters. It is that good !!!

Bill brought to life what few have ever experienced.

I read Bill's book, "Red Summer" and did not put it down until I finished it. I have first-hand knowledge as to how I know Bill brought the characters and way of living to life; not because I was there but because Sharon, the main "character" is my cousin. He captured my cousins' (David and Ron as well) personalities and lives just as I have known them to be. I knew my cousin Sharon chose a hard life after she and I graduated from high school (I went to college and she went fishing; this was 1979 and she has done so to this day) but I never knew just how hard that life was for her, and I never, ever heard a complaint about it. Bill wrote of his life with Sharon as his captain, and with the folks of Egegik, in such a way that you feel as though you are right there with them all. He brings you in from the first page and you feel saddened at the end because you want to read more! Thanks Bill for writing of your experiences so descriptively that I felt I had spent wonderful, miserable, exciting, tiring, and rewarding summers with my cousin. - Barb

Egegik, AK - The Real Thing

I'd like to witness to the accuracy of Carter's portrayal of Egegik summers and the fishing men (and some hardy women) do there. I worked eight summers in Egegik (1994-2001), starting in the cannery, set-netting for two summers and drift fishing for four. I lived and worked with two long time Egegik families (one not so much a family, but a clan). Carter has squarely captured the joy, exhaustion, laughter, anger, dissipation, recklessness, heroism, bawdiness, and adventure of Egegik summers. Everything he writes in his book is true and he does not exagerate (hard as that may seem!). The people he writes about (many I also knew) are just as lost, wild, mean, strong, and gripping as he portrays them. Carter's book isn't the last word about Egegik summers (there are many many books that could be written about the drift fishing, the cannery workers, the fish and game officers, and more), but it'd dead on accurate for the territory it covers. His book shows why so many of us went back summer after summer and still dream of doing so now that we've moved on to the rest of our lives.

Crazy and Exciting, Just Like His First Book

A man who is drawn to adventures as easily as many of us are drawn to our remote controls, Bill Carter offers us the gift of roaming vicariously into his world as he sets sail for another wild journey in Red Summer. This second memoir from the author of the sentimental and heartbreaking Fools Rush In, takes us to the waters of Alaska for the core fishing season where he toiled on a boat for four years doing harder work than most of us will ever encounter. The landscape is depressing, the townspeople are harsh and the money isn't nearly as good as you'd think it would be for life-threatening labor, yet Bill keeps going back for more. When you're not marveling at his physical and emotional stamina, you're wondering why the heck he hasn't packed up camp and returned to the sunny desert of Arizona that he calls home. By the end of the story, after you've met the "characters" who are now like family to him, and you appreciate the greater good of what fishing in that part of the world can provide, you'll understand. And you'll search your mind wondering where Bill's life will take him next...and hope he invites you along.

An adrenalin-filled armchair adventure

Bill Carter is a fisher of men. There. I've spent two hours trying not to say it in the opening paragraph of my review of his new memoir Red Summer: The Danger, Madness and Exaltation of Salmon Fishing in a Remote Alaskan Village. But he is. In the memoir, he also happens to work as a salmon fisherman off the shores of Egegik, Alaska. The slim book put out by Scribner tells a solid story on several levels. First, it's an adrenalin-pumping armchair adventure. Commercial fishing is among the world's most dangerous occupations, with a higher death rate by far than any other. Carter gives a skin-tingling account of what it's like to dance with death on a daily basis under the guise of trying to earn a few bucks. The work is brutal. In the span of about four weeks, Carter spends hundreds of hours dislodging millions of salmon by hand from the nets strewn across the Egegik River. The skin on his fingers cracks so bad it takes Super Glue to keep it together. Several times, he nearly drowns in the rush of fish swarming down the river in their frantic effort to spawn. The tendons in his arm swell to tennis-ball size. He lives in a shack with no running water and boards on the windows to keep out bears. He regularly wakes in a cold sweat from the nightmares the place provokes in him. His fear never leaves. "Everything up here experiences a harsh death, humans included," Carter says in the book. "No one who stays here ever ends up in a hospice. No one drinks green tea and reads self-help books....This is a land of extremes and those who keep returning follow the silent restriction that acts as the only social law: Do the work or leave." Egegik's not a postcard-pretty community. It's remote. Violent. Unfriendly to outsiders. Almost a shantytown. The place attracts extreme personalities, so any description like zany or stupid or tough falls exponentially short. It's through the stories Carter tells, with both objectivity and heart, that you get a real sense of the people and place. And while they're not likely to be people you'd bond with in the real world, they're fascinating to read about. There's nothing romantic about the place, but Carter views it with a poet's eye. He finds connections between humanity's struggle for conquest and the salmon's desperate attempts to reach fresh water long enough to survive, spawn, then die. The other fishermen don't struggle with the morality of what they're doing - it's a business and they're entitled to seek their profits. Carter does. "I fish commercially and slaughter thousands....each day, I find one moment, no matter how tired I am or how much slime of their guts I have in my hair or on my body, to stare into their oval black eyes. Their mouths gasp for their last breath, and I feel the weight of guilt." In addition to a Hemingway-esque man-against-fish story, Red Summer is compelling from an environmental standpoint, especially in light of the headlines coming out of California about the cancellation