Exploring by bush plane, boat and foot, Hoagland gives an account [of the interior wilds of British Columbia in "Notes from the Century Before"] at once blunt and rhapsodic of this demi-paradise and its self-exiled inhabitants. Why did they go there? For gold, to be sure. But gold cloaked a more interesting, and more persistent, motive in human nature: man's need to pit himself against a savage and magnificent wilderness—and come out alive. But now, a mere three years since the author's first journey, the last frontier, or last Eden, has practically disappeared under helicopters and neon. Hoagland's lyric account, therefore, becomes all the more eloquent, for it records not only a fading ideal but is, finally, a parable—and warning—for America.

This book is as remarkable as the landscape and people that it describes. Like the Kispiox River, it is all "dazzle and slash"; it's...