Whether experiencing run-ins with crusty locals, reviving long dead historical characters last heard from in high school history books, enduring rough weather or savoring majestic landscapes, he brings it all to vivid life. With strong descriptive powers and a clear appetite for his task, Fox succeeds in making his journey sound romantic, urgent, valuable and appealing as hell. -- Andrew McCarthy - New York Times Book Review
Northland...[has] that touch of jump and sparkle that every good travelogue needs. -- Peter Lewis - Christian Science Monitor
Fox is an excellent guide, capturing the majesty of the Northland's diverse geology, flora, weather and seasons. But [his] greatest accomplishment is that he uses all of the landscape and history to capture the people who live and work on the border now. -- Peter Geye - Minneapolis Star Tribune
Northland is a revelation: a gripping east-west journey 3,987 miles along an invisible line. The book is filled with history, irony, adventure, finely drawn characters, and a true sense of place. Fox, a son of the North and a gifted writer, is the perfect guide to this world. -- McKenzie Funk, author of Windfall
The border between the US and Canada can seem less significant than other boundaries that have shaped America-the southern border with Mexico, the Mason-Dixon line, the frontier-but this wasn't always so. With a native northlander's knowledgeable and loving eye, Porter Fox seeks and finds the furtive beauties and forgotten histories of our borderlands to the north. -- Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck
In this rip-roaring adventure story, Porter Fox illuminates every imaginable facet of the northern border: historical, natural, economic, environmental, geopolitical, and, above everything else, the human. -- Neel Mukherjee, author of A State of Freedom
Porter Fox's wild trip across the rivers and lakes, prairies and mountains is at turns wondrous, meditative, and scary. In Fox's patient telling, the northland is less a border than a threshold, a kind of otherworldly membrane wherein people are in conversation with the stream systems and watersheds upon which life depends and that political boundaries work to ignore. -- Robert Sullivan, author of My American Revolution
A riveting illumination of the northern border's contentious past, made urgent by the denizens we meet along the pages who are fighting-doggedly, courageously-for the right to course-correct its future. -- Courtney Maum, author of Touch
Northland is more than a rollicking, acutely reported, and beautifully written account of an epic journey from Maine to Washington across the arc of this country's magnificent and half-forgotten boreal perimeter. It is also an illuminating, provocative, and poignant glimpse into what America once was-along with a celebration of what remains of that same America along its obscure, dismissed, and unspeakably lovely northern frontier. -- Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile
Richly populated with fascinating northlanders, Native Americans, and many border patrol agents, this is highly entertaining and informative travel literature. -- Kirkus (starred review)
Part adventure, some history, and a little bit Studs Terkel, filled with encounters with people as diverse as the landscape. -- Jon Foro - Amazon Book Review