Carol Brightman graduated from Vassar and received an M.A. from the University of Chicago.  She won the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She is co-editor of Venceremos Brigade: Young Americans Sharing the Life and Work of Revolutionary Cuba, and co-author with Larry Rivers of Drawings and Directions. She is author of Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, editor of Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975, and author of Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure, and of Total Insecurity: The Myth of American Omnipotence. She lives in Walpole, Maine.

Photo by Kelly Brook

Forthcoming Book: Scouting the Perimeter...

is the saga of two distinct places, two disparate worlds, and how a large family on the move drew them together a hundred and thirty years ago.  It began with the tales told Carol Brightman by her father about their ancestors’ migration to Alaska from Maine that he heard from his father.  They were fascinating stories filled with Indians, German plutocrats, a Russian Nihilist, pioneers, fisherman, and the US Navy. They formed the narrative of the Alaska Oil and Guano Company, the herring fishery started by Carol’s great-grandfather.

4700 miles to the South, at this same time, other members of this far-flung family were trading in Havana and Cienfuegos provinces—major sugar producing regions of Cuba.  How were these roaming ancestors connected to the Brightmans who settled in southeast Alaska?  Why was America’s lust for Cuba, then still possessed by Spain, the very opposite of her diffidence toward Alaska, which was purchased from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, and then largely forgotten?

Scouting the Perimeter’s action moves swiftly between the vastly different worlds of Cuba and Alaska. Two brothers are separated, one from the other; and while the older, Alonso, finds his way into the sugar business, the other, Leander, loses all direction in Alaska.  Leander sails to Cuba, fumbles about with Alonso, and ultimately joins the rebels in the independence war, later named—after the Americans invade—the Spanish-American War.

Because this is historical fiction and not strictly history, Brightman takes the reader on exciting side journeys in the late 19th century with a combination of real people and events and some of the most remarkable characters ever imagined.

The book includes a photo gallery of the author’s Alaskan ancestors, including her great grandfather, great grandmother, and grandfather, although the Brightman surname is changed in the text. Other portraits are of the Russian Soboleff family, who joined the Brightmans on Killisnoo Island, the ship they sailed, and the Tlingit Indians who filled out this extraordinary community. Brightman has also drawn from the rich photo collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington for original images of Sitka, Killisnoo, the Bear, and the Muir Glacier, together with images of Havana, Cienfuegos, and rebels fighting the Cuban independence war.  Maps will allow readers to follow the movements of key characters through both nineteenth century Cuba and Alaska.