The quick decisions and reactions required to survive in those conditions just don't strike me as skills possessed by the majority of people. For example, they mentioned how if you took off your glove within 30 seconds your hand would freeze (at some temp or other that they were dog sledding in). I just have trouble believing that people have the abilities they would need to survive. It amazes me that anyone can deal with that sort of thing. I do not think I have the ability to even understand minus 60 degrees. On the other hand, people aren't dropping like flies from diphtheria. Of course I felt all nostalgic reading it and it seemed to me that our modern world is a much duller place. It amazed me really that the majority of these people, despite living these hard lives in Alaska lived to be very old. At the end they tell you how a lot of the humans ended up as well.

I suppose it is somewhat silly to worry about the dogs anyway since the book is set in the 1920's so the longest living dog would have been long, long dead by now. I mention that not as a spoiler but to reassure people sensitive to animal cruelty that they can handle the book. I needn't have worried, since they both lived to be old dogs.

I was so worried about the fates of the two main sled dogs - Togo and Balto. I think that might have done me in if I was actually reading and not just listening. It isn't that that information wasn't interesting, but I thought I was reading a book about this epidemic and for hours, that is for days of listening, the plot did not advance at all. What I did not bargain for was the author pretty much giving the history of the peoples of Alaska from the time that the first human set foot there to the time of the Nome epidemic all at once, so I had back story for maybe 2 hours straight. You would certainly expect digressions of the history of dog sledding, or on some local culture, etc.

The book is of course about a journey made by dog sled to bring vaccines to Nome Alaska to save the locals from a diphtheria epidemic. What did you like best about The Cruelest Miles? What did you like least?

The cruelest miles book