James Campbell

press release: A Room of One's Own welcomes James Campbell, author of the new book Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild, and his daughter Aidan for a reading and book-signing!

Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaskan Wild is an ode to America's disappearing wilderness and a profound meditation on the role of nature in a child's development. Fans of nature writers like John McPhee, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Edward Hoagland, and Barry Lopez, as well as readers of adventure narratives and memoirs such as Into the Wild, The Last American Man, Wild; H is for Hawk and Still Points North will be drawn to Campbell's beautiful descriptions of Alaska's glacier-fed rivers and rugged mountains.

Jim decides to make one last trip to Alaska with his daughter Aidan. In Eskimo culture, men do not distinguish between sons and daughters. They believe that girls deserve a rite of passage and they often take their daughters on hunting trips before they leave their villages. This will be Jim's parting gift to Aidan, their last journey together before she leaves home for college. So they backpack over Alaska's northernmost mountains, the Brooks Range, to the headwaters of the mighty Hulahula River, and paddle their folding canoe 110 miles to the Arctic Ocean. The journey takes them through one of the planet's most remote places, a land of wolves, Dall sheep, golden eagles, and bears. It is a thrilling, arduous, and dangerous trip, one that tests them-and their relationship-as never before.