No Place Like Nome

Beyond Sled Dogs and Gold

Somewhere between myths and hard facts you find Nome, poised also between yesterday and tomorrow. Drawing on his background in anthropology and an equal passion for history, Michael Engelhard surveys the seam that links two neighboring continents through the lens of one pivotal city. The region's legacy of millennia shines on pages enriched by this writer's recollections—from mammoths to Cold War monuments, from a spa turned orphanage, to cyclist miners and shaman hoards. Meet the explorers and adventurers, reindeer herders and hustlers, the dancers, drummers, dreamers, warriors, walrus-tusk carvers, and whalers, clergy, foragers, and photographers who shaped a place of conflicting visions as thoroughly as it shaped them.