Read Ice Palace by Edna Ferber Free Online

Book Title: Ice Palace
The author of the book: Edna Ferber
Edition: Lightyear Press
The size of the: 3.31 MB
City - Country: No data
Date of issue: December 1st 1992
ISBN: 0899682782
ISBN 13: 9780899682785
Language: English
Format files: PDF
Loaded: 2174 times
Reader ratings: 7.4

Read full description of the books:

I wanted to read Edna Ferber and found this at our annual library book sale. It was first published in March 1958, several months before Congress approved the Alaska Statehood Act. Statehood had come before Congress at least once before in 1954 when it did not pass, and it is said this book influenced passage in the affirmative. Of course I was interested.

Alaska became a state in January 1959 and I first came to Alaska nearly 20 years later. I have known many people who were born in the Territory of Alaska and who remember those much earlier days and I loved to hear the stories. I have never lived in the far north and this book isn't about the part of Alaska that I know and love. But loving Alaska is what this book is about and I could certainly relate on that level.

There are two fictitious towns - Baranof and Oogruk. I suspect Ferber didn't want anyone to think she had just renamed any real places, and so I was a bit confused about the geography. I liked Ferber's prose. I might have wanted better "people" characterizations, but the characterization of the setting was excellent.

That said, I remember as a child growing up in California how tiresome Texans were in telling the rest of us that they were the greatest state. I suspect that non-Alaskans might feel similarly about Ice Palace. This is dated and no longer reflects the Alaska that is. (It predates the discovery of oil most notably.) I missed the good characterizations and for that reason only have rated this a middling 3 stars.

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Read information about the author

Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels were popular in her lifetime and included the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), Cimarron (1929; made into the 1931 film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), and Giant (1952; made into the 1956 Hollywood movie).
Ferber was born August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, Jacob Charles Ferber, and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Julia (Neumann) Ferber. After living in Chicago, Illinois, and Ottumwa, Iowa, at the age of 12 Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and briefly attended Lawrence University. She took newspaper jobs at the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal before publishing her first novel. She covered the 1920 Republican National Convention and 1920 Democratic National Convention for the United Press Association.
Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, along with a rich and diverse collection of supporting characters. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons; through this technique, Ferber demonstrated her belief that people are people and that the not-so-pretty people have the best character.
Ferber was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of wits who met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in New York.