Red Summer - Salmon Fishing in Alaska

September 2, 2008: Star Tribune -Minneapolis- St Paul Minnesota

Grappling with fish, and life
An outdoorsman/writer unsparingly chronicles his Alaskan summers with the salmon.
By Cynthia Dickison

One of my favorite ways to cool off during Tucson summers is by reading books in which the action unfolds in extremely cold climates: Alfred Lansing's gripping adventure of Antarctic survival, Endurance; accounts of the dangers of climbing Mount Everest such as Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and High Crimes by Michael Kodas; and adventure novels from Jack London's The Call of the Wild to Dan Simmons' The Terror. Whether such tales are tall or true, they provide much-needed chills this time of year.

Bill Carter wondered the same when he accepted an offer from a stranger to hire on during the summer salmon fishing season in the Alaskan bush country. His account of the experience, "Red Summer" (Scribner, 256 pages, $25), is actually the story of four summers, and although his descriptions of the brutality of the work and life are unflinching, he deftly illuminates their perverse appeal.
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August 7, 2008: Tucson Weekly - Cool Reads

Bisbee's Bill Carter recollects on four fascinating seasons of fishing in Alaska - By Gene Armstrong

Gonna build something this summer.
This summer, grant us all the power to drink on top of water towers,
With love, and trust, and shows, all summer.
Let this be my annual reminder that we can all be something bigger.
-- "Constructive Summer" by the Hold Steady

Bill Carter's Red Summer, in which the Bisbee resident recounts his experiences during four summers as a commercial salmon fisherman in Alaska, combines elements of those works with a balance of natural history and first-person details, showing off talents rivaling those of John McPhee. The fact that Carter's book loosely shares subject matter with the Discovery Channel's pop-heroic reality show Deadliest Catch doesn't hurt.
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June 1st 2008: New York Times Sunday Book Review
"If you are one of the millions of Americans who have been seduced by “Deadliest Catch,” the Discovery Channel’s testosterone-fueled show about king crab fishermen in the Bering Sea, then you know that commercial fishing is dangerous work — and irresistible to watch. Every year, boats sink, fishermen drown and captains clash with the elements, all of which result in huge ratings. In Bill Carter’s “Red Summer,” his account of four summers working as a set-net fisherman in a rough town in southeastern Alaska, the fishing and the weather are less extreme, but the danger level is tantalizingly high. Death, we are reminded, is always one mistake away — a shoelace caught in a net, a skiff overloaded with salmon. Fall into the 42-degree water and you’ll be dead in minutes. But if you live in a town as tough as Egegik, it’s the lifestyle that’s going to kill you, not the fishing.

“Red Summer” is about life at the extreme edge of the food chain, and nowhere is the food chain more violent, more awesome or more intense than in Egegik"...... Read more

June 6th, 2008: Tucson Green Magazine review
Bisbee resident Bill Carter is a fisher of men. There. I’ve spent two hours trying not to say it in the opening paragraph of my review of his new memoir Red Summer: The Danger, Madness and Exaltation of Salmon Fishing in a Remote Alaskan Village. But he is. In the memoir, he also happens to work as a salmon fisherman off the shores of Egegik, Alaska.
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June/July issue 2008: National Geographic Adventurer Review
The titular color of Bill Carter’s new book is the red of spawning salmon making their runs up rivers on the Alaskan Peninsula. In Red Summer, Carter, a freelance journalist with a fine book on the Bosnian war to his credit, draws on the four seasons he spent netting sockeye in Bristol Bay- considered, even by Alaska’s grizzled fishing pros, to be grueling and risky labor. The result is a vivid chronicle of life in Egegik, an isolated village in the Aleutian chain and an outpost of struggling families who depend on nature’s cycle to survive. “This place is ancient,” Carter writes, “but there are no human ruins. It is ancient because other than the native people who occupied this small parcel of land, the view hasn’t changed since the end of the last ice age.” The narrative ranges from meditations on life at the nation’s far tip to descriptions of Carter’s boss, Sharon Hart, the most respected woman on the water, who hauls salmon for 20 hours at a stretch. One day they catch an astonishing 28,000 pounds; every pound has to be heaved by hand. Hart is so crippled by the work that she sleeps sitting up, her forearms on pillows. “Hands down, Carter says, “she’s the toughest man in Bristol Bay.” And from what we learn in Red Summer, there’s no higher praise. -Anthony Brandt, National Geographic Adventurer

June 6th, 2008: Outside Magazine Review (PDF)
"Bill Carter spent four summers slipping on salmon guts as a commercial fisherman in Egegik, Alaska, and the book he came away with is an honest, refreshingly understated look at a profession that’s known for, well, exaggeration. Carter, an Arizona-based jour- nalist, simply gets everything right, from the damaged, broke, drunk fishermen with their carpal-tunnel-racked arms to the sound of a thousand fish hitting a net at once. "

May 11th, 2008: Seattle Times
Author and documentary director Bill Carter lives in southern Arizona. But like a bird migrating to the Arctic to nest each summer, he traveled north for four summers to fish the annual sockeye salmon run on the river flowing past the tiny village of Egegik, Alaska.
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May 5th, 2008: Arizona Republic
Author Bill Carter says he doesn't have a death wish. Yet he happened to be in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo, dressed as a clown and delivering humanitarian aid to Bosnians victimized by Serbian aggressors, literally dodging bullets.
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