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The Book of the Week is “Far From Home, An Alaskan Senator Faces the Extreme Climate of Washington, D.C.” by Lisa Murkowski with Charles Wohlforth, published in 2025.
Murkowski was born in 1957 in Alaska. Since the federal government owns more than thirty percent of Alaska, its policies play a large role in the state’s economy and well-being. More than a quarter of the land is owned by the state government; a little more than a tenth—by corporations owned by Native Americans, who comprise about seventeen percent of Alaska’s population.
Alaska has more than two hundred rural villages, and, as of the book’s writing, some still had the living standards of a Third-World country—no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no paved roads. It is quite cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive for politicians to make campaign visits to those villages, via a few different planes, boats or cars. Murkowski, a moderate Republican U.S. senator who votes pursuant to her conscience, not the Party line, takes the time and trouble to meet her fellow residents, because she passionately cares about them.
“White people in Washington were a substantial minority but they had created a kind of bubble of affluence, an apartheid in which they didn’t have to interact with people of color and could willfully ignore their own prejudice.” Murkowski (who is herself white) found that out when her sons (also white) were on a Virginia soccer team with diverse members. White parents cheering on their kids, spewed the most offensive slurs, but they didn’t consider themselves detestable creatures. They still considered themselves good people.
Other adults behaved badly, too. In the single-digit 2000’s, in Washington, D.C., prosecutors in the Justice Department put oil-industry lobbyist Bill Allen on trial for corruption, but suppressed evidence that allowed Allen to go free, and at the same time, ruined the reputation of the wrongly accused late Senator Ted Stevens, Republican from Alaska. The moral of the story can be summed up in two cliches, “A man is known by the company he keeps” and “When you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.” Stevens knew that Allen was “bad news” but allied with him, anyway.
In the early single-digit 2000’s, when Murkowski was running for reelection, she lost the primary to yet another sleazy piece-of-work of an alleged grownup. However, her father impressed upon her the fact that, as his daughter, she should never give up! So she continued her campaign as a write-in candidate. Her victory would thus be extremely unlikely. Nonetheless, Murkowski’s cousin took particular delight in posting the opposing candidate’s sordid, hypocritical history on social media, and journalists picked up on it. An opposition research firm gave her free publicity by also doing the same.
Read the book to learn much more about Murkowski’s life experiences that led her to end up in the U.S. Senate, and the trials, tribulations and triumphs in her career.