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Lester, Jean. Jorgy: The Life of Native Alaskan Bush Pilot and Airline Captain Holger “Jorgy” Jorgensen._ Ester, AK: Ester Republic Press, 2007. $25

In the late 60′s my grandfather purchased an 8mm film camera complete with light bar. It was a hand-wound model that would only capture a minute or two of action before needing to be rewound. The movies he captured from that era featured select highlights: children crawling on the ground, adults gesticulating towards children to get them to crawl, birthday cakes being extinguished. The special moments were carefully selected and shaped. Watching them now is entertaining and effectively allows us to expand our memories.

In the 80′s my grandfather acquired a videotape camcorder. The inexpensive recording medium and lack of any processing time or fees meant that we could record every moment of every family event. And we did. A tripod was set up in the dining room so that whole family dinners could be recorded in their entirety; each and every Christmas present was unwrapped for the camera in slow succession. Watching these tapes now is an exercise in endurance. The lack of any selection or shapliness to the events reveals the banality of the majority of our conversation. Comments and remembrances that had us laughing till we cried or fondly remembering other family events are buried in the lengthy stretches of passing carrots and explaining mundane daily business. The documentarian of the past, sifting through the sands of the creek to find nuggets of gold, was replaced by an undiscerning strip mine.

Such is the effect of Jorgy: The Life of Native American Bush Pilot and Airline Captain Holger “Jorgy” Jorgensen. The book reads as though Jean Lester, the “as told to” author, merely transcribed hours of interview tapes with Jorgy Jorgensen. Events are repeated, fascinating side-stories are introduced and abandoned without care, rabbit-trails are followed at whim, and even seemingly unrelated political ramblings are included with little context or thoughtful development.

The shame of it is that the life of Jorgy Jorgensen appears to have been an interesting and important one. Here is a man who spent his early years subsisting in a mining village on the Alaskan frontier. After just an 8th-grade education, he stepped into the early years of Alaska aviation, helping to build important airstrips and learning to fly. Jorgensen had a front seat in watching the development of the Alaska oil and air industries. Had Lester collated the interviews and given them some kind of narrative shape, even as little as ironing out the temporal wrinkles that often appear when we tell stories about our lives, the events of Jorgensen’s life could have presented a compelling narrative of the history of aviation, Alaska, and the life of native peoples in the frozen wastes. As it stands, the considerable power and romance of the story is lost.

I still find myself wanting to go back and watch the old 8mm films my grandfather made, but I cannot remember a single fleeting desire to sit through a recorded family dinner. For dogged researchers interested in the facts of the area and period, the book will stand as a solid record of one man’s experience of Alaskan aviation. However, a solid record does not make a compelling biography.