Boom Town Boy: Coming of Age on Alaska's Lost Frontier: Coming of Age in Alaska's Lost Frontier - Softcover

"Jack de Yonge's boyhood memoir starts out as a wry, engaging story and quickly becomes a great read. His lean, evocative prose, salted with acerbic wit and impressive detail sends the reader on an energetic romp through Alaska's rough-edged, mid-20th Century frontier. Best of all, de Yonge perfectly captures life through the eyes of a child where a flood, a child's drowning or bullies lurking in the street loom as large as the perils of Odysseus. Refraining from both sentimentality and psychobabble, de Yonge presents his boyhood in all its rambunctious, randy reality. He was Tom Sawyer on the tundra and his tale is worthy of Mark Twain." --David Horsey, Seattle Times

A memoir as sparkling as a spring-thaw icicle and as honest and revealing as yellow snow. --Tom Robbins, author of "B is for Beer"

"Boom Town Boy vividly portrays a frontier Alaska that no longer exists. Readers will thank Jack DeYonge - the Boom Town Boy himself - for describing his youth colorfully and transforming his memories into compelling prose. It must be said - Boom Town Boy is unique contribution to Alaska history." -- Michael Carey, Anchorage Daily News

John B. Saul - "Seattle Times"

Jack de Yonge recalls a moment in his childhood when he came "as close to exaltation as ever I would feel, a boy on the edge of a vast wilderness still long on animals and fish and short on people."

But as Fairbanks, Alaska, became long on people, de Yonge's childhood activities took place more and more amid adult shenanigans that are usually considered less than exalted.

In "Boom Town Boy: Coming of Age on Alaska's Lost Frontier," de Yonge, a veteran journalist whose career included stints at the Fairbanks News-Miner, The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, looks back on his early days in Fairbanks with "amused fondness," describing standard American boyhood activities such as music lessons, baseball and family outings, all against a backdrop of one hell-raising town.

From the moment he slid forth from his mother, who delivered when startled by a celebratory dynamite blast on July 4, 1934, de Yonge lived among rampant prostitution, drunkenness, open gambling, homophobia, pedophilia and violence of all sorts. Racism, he further notes, was embedded in the culture of "The Greatest Generation."

de Yonge survived all this with a droll wit, sympathy for the underdog and a distrust of "those in power and those with money." That point of view slips into the book in occasional jabs at the Republican Party and organized religion.

He presents his memoir in snippets, some describing events in Alaskan history, some covering boy adventures and explorations of Fairbanks' unsavory corners, as the city went from its post gold-rush slumber to the boom brought on by World War II.

Some of the vignettes end too abruptly, and the book has an unfinished feel about it; it needs another chapter to explain how that hard-to-manage boy who left Alaska after his sophomore year in high school became the accomplished man who ended up as a newspaperman, educator, environmental activist and political consultant in Washington state.

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Libby Martin - "Fairbanks Daily News-Miner" Children see the world through a unique prism. With little experience due to their short time on planet Earth, they experience life without a background to which to compare things. For this reason, every day is a new adventure, every adventure an exciting and marvelous journey.
Maybe that's why they see everything with such awe and wonder, because it is novel and original, unlike anything they've ever experienced.
And even though we've all looked through that prism, we forget as we get older, and more jaded, have new experiences with which to compare the old, and start seeing the world through our "adult" binoculars rather than the child's mirror.
Former Fairbanksan Jack de Yonge, however, does a pretty good job of reverting to that childhood prism in his new memoir, "Boom Town Boy: Coming of Age on Alaska's Lost Frontier." Jack has more than 40 years of writing experience behind him, so even though the book was written by an adult, he has found a way to tap into that childhood prism, setting down his adventures and escapades as a "good bad boy" in 1930-40's Fairbanks.
"It was a tiny, isolated town," Jack writes in the introduction. ..". a walk away from wilderness -- where a boy could, and did, find an abundance of adventure."
His adventure began early in the morning on July 4, 1934. Fairbanks was a former mining town, remote, still somewhat untamed, the end of the road. He writes, "The nice thing about Fairbanks, my dad liked to joke, was that no matter what direction we took out of town, we soon arrived in Nowhere."
Jack was born to the accompaniment of fireworks and other explosions, typical early Fairbanks Independence Day celebrations. He portrays his birth this way: "I skidded into existence early the morning of July 4, 1934, ... when a great 'BOOM!' startled my mother into making a sudden contraction that shot me, forehead first, into the world."
He was the fi