We sense the desperation of Nome's only doctor, Curtis Welch, who watched children die and feared an epidemic as brutal as the influenza outbreak that had wiped out thousands - particularly among the state's indigenous population - a few years earlier. The players also come to life thanks to the Salisburys' liberal use of quotes from interviews with the original participants and their descendants. Their summary of how diphtheria kills is the most chilling course in anatomy since Sebastian Junger's primer on what it feels like to drown in T he Perfect Storm. The authors leave no path unexplored along the way. Nevertheless, within a few years planes had surpassed dogs as the most efficient way to get around Alaska.) (Though some proposed flying the serum to Nome, the cold proved too formidable for a plane's temperamental mechanics. The relay is compelling enough to stand alone, but it also serves as narrative fabric into which the Salisburys weave multiple elements, such as how Nome came to be (gold), the role of dogs in early Alaskan life (crucial) and the rise of aviation in the state. And did so in temperatures that rarely rose above 40 degrees below zero, carrying a cargo that would be ruined if it froze. But they also tell their story in a style straightforward enough that readers will be swept up in the drama of how 20 mushers covered nearly 700 miles in about six days.
The Salisburys' meticulous research is apparent on every page (their "selected" bibliography is 11 pages long). While the title of their book, The Cruelest Miles, suggests just that, cousins Gay and Laney Salisbury instead present a finely detailed history of a crisis that captured the nation's attention as it played out in a territory thousands of miles away. It would be easy to turn this script into a melodrama. Selfless, determined men and their loyal, equally determined dogs. The annual 1,200-mile dog-sled race that's been unfolding across western Alaska this past week commemorates the incredible - and entirely true - story of a desperate relay to deliver serum to Nome when a diphtheria outbreak threatened the town in 1925. Hollywood should have looked instead to the Iditarod.
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