Going to Extremes is fine reading. It is thick with whole people, exotic landscapes, the nervous and constant curiosity of an adventurer who knows that the essence of place is more likely found while chatting in barrooms than while viewing the wondrous works of man and nature. (pp. 290-91)

McGinnis has a sharp eye for the rough and beery self-servers, the opportunistic but misfit wanderers who have swelled Alaska's population since the discovery of oil. The vignettes that fill the first sixteen chapters form an exquisite cinéma vérité whose unmoderated but soon patent message tells of the destruction of nature and culture by exploitative invaders.

There's not a sentence of preaching in the book. Again and again, with an elegant journalistic jujitsu, McGinnis has his people do themselves in, announce their own poignance, crassness, lostness and, now and then, nobility…. [His vignettes are] strongest when dealing...