SOURCE: A review of To the White Sea, in World Literature Today, Autumn, 1994, pp. 809-10.

[In the following review, Curran states that Dickey's To the White Sea "becomes a quest for the pure ecstasy that identification with nature will grant Muldrow."]

In the early going To the White Sea appears to be an adventure tale on the order of Deliverance. Ball-turret gunner's B-29 downed over Tokyo. The only survivor is Muldrow, a Lewis Medlock figure in wartime Japan instead of the north Georgia woods. His life as the son of a wifeless "loner of all loners" on the north face of the Brooks Range in Alaska provides the survival skills to escape from Tokyo to the northern island of Hokkaido. There he will find an environment comparable to where you encounter "cold that cleans out your insides like fire," the one he shared with Eskimos. Once again Dickey...