Seward's Folly

The year 2017 marks the 150th anniversary of the Alaska Purchase, and it is only natural for scholars and university presses to take note. Lee A. Farrow's Seward's Folly is an easy-reading, not excessively detailed effort at such a commemoration. As Farrow notes, no scholarly work has been written on this subject since Ronald J. Jensen's 1975 The Alaska Purchase and Russian-American Relations. While Farrow's effort probably meets the general needs of most of the 2 million tourists who visit Alaska each year, it is by no means a thorough treatment. Farrow's approach is to provide general coverage of the topics she chooses to address. She seems to avoid dealing with any aspect of the subject in depth, preferring to summarize events. The narrative therefore moves along at a steady pace, not unlike scheduled cruises through the inside passage, but without sufficient detail to hold readers' attention. The notes section is frustrating because the citations are not linked to pages in the text, and no citations are given for certain matters that should be addressed. One puzzling problem in a work on Russian-American relations is the presence of only three Russian-language sources in the bibliography, one of them containing two mistakes in transliteration

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