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Rating: 
Summary: Pure Joy
Review: I am an artist and naturalist who has lived in Alaska for over 20 years. There are of course a lot of good books on the wildlife of Alaska, and a few good books on Alaskan art, but none give me as much pleasure and inspiration as this one. If I had to leave the state forever and could only have one book about Alaska, this would be it.
The focus here is on wildlife, and not on scenery, though of course there are some nice examples of that, too. For various reasons, some obvious, the most covered animals are moose, caribou, bear, and Dall sheep. Pretty much everything is treated, though, including the wonderful but relatively little-known pika.
Berry had the level of experience, talent, and devotion that makes his work in many ways more useful as a reference than most photography. (If you doubt that, get serious with both photography and field sketching and you'll find out why.) That said, most of the work in here involves pencil sketches with releatively few watercolor studies, so there is not a lot of color information.
If you like to field sketch and are starting to think you are pretty good at it, read this and you will probably get a few useful doses of humility. If anyone is better at field sketching than Berry, I'm unaware of them, and I've been looking hard. Certainly nobody surpasses Berry for Alaska.
There is not a lot of wildlife art out there that I find satisfying, and a great deal that I find annoying and even disgusting. Berry on the other hand is pure magic, and I love this book more every time I pick it up. I pick it up a lot.
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