If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska by Heather Lende. Algonquin Books, 2005. $23.95 — 288 pp.

The Pirates Lafitte: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf by William C. Davis. Harcourt Books, 2005. $28 — 720 pp.

Alaska.

If we think of Alaska, we probably think of glaciers and snow, wildlife (both human and otherwise), gold, lonely days, expensive living, pipeline conflicts, bush pilots, and cruise ships. We think of a place where people are tougher than in the Lower Forty-eight, a wilderness where people may still travel by dogsled and where no city lights block out the stars at night.

What makes Heather Lende’s If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name: News from Small-Town Alaska such a wonderful book is that while she reassures us that the Alaskan wilderness still exists, she also shows us that life in an Alaskan small town, in this case the town of Haines, which is 90 miles north of Juneau, bears strong similarities to life in Waynesville or Sylva, Franklin or Clyde. There are enormous differences, of course — a couple in this isolated town prepares the dead for burial free of charge, for example, having felt called to their hard profession, and there are gun feuds here that largely have disappeared from our mountains. Despite all the differences, however, Lende makes it clear that Alaskans have much in common with those of us living below the frozen wilderness.

The pieces collected in If You Lived Here grew out of Lende’s reports on National Public Radio. Lende has a great gift for making the reader comfortable, for talking to us as if we were gathered around her kitchen table rather than reading from a book thousands of miles away. She takes pride both in her writing and radio work and in her job as a mother of five children and as a homemaker. An Episcopalian, Lende frequently describes how great a role faith plays in her daily life and those of her neighbors. Lende tells us what sort of schools are available in Haines, describes the different sorts of churches and faiths, gives us the various sorts of people. We finish her book feeling as though we had visited Haines.

Of course, enormous differences separate Haines from our own mountain towns. Because the best way to get in and out of Haines is by air or water, there are more boating and plane accidents in Haines. It’s not a place in which to be gravely ill, not if you want quality medical care. Haines must also be quite expensive; Outside magazine reported it as one of America’s top 10 towns to live in if you are a millionaire. Then there are the usual activities and sights we associate with Alaska: snowmobile races and sea lions, beaches and snow-covered mountains, a whole crew of eccentrics who would live nowhere else in the world. If You Lived Here is, to put it succinctly, Alaska with a recognizable home-town touch.

Lende’s style helps create the warmth surrounding this fine book. Here she offers a humorous look at what a foreigner thought of Haines:

A Swedish high school exchange student came to Haines one fall and, after driving from the airport, was given the town tour. When asked what she thought of it, she said she liked what little she’d seen. When she was told there wasn’t any more to see, she wept and begged to be taken to a real American town.

Though our own mountain towns are equivalent in size to Haines, none are as isolated as Haines. Such isolation often means making certain personal adjustments, as Lende reports here:

The latest census figures put our population at just over twenty-four hundred. That means we’re big enough to avoid people we don’t like, but small enough to have to be careful what we say in public. The longer I live here, the more I understand how important it is to choose my words — and battles — cautiously.

Lende’s If You Lived Here will be available June 3. Put this one on your reading list.

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Let’s go the opposite end of the country and take a quick look at William C. Davis’ The Pirates Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf. Scheduled for publication this month, The Pirates Laffite tells the story of the Laffite family of New Orleans, focusing in particular on Jean and Pierre Laffite, the brothers who smuggled goods and attacked Spanish merchants on the Gulf Coast, and who later became famous for the support given to Andrew Jackson and the American army in the Battle of New Orleans in 1814. In the last chapter of his book, Davis continues his fine story by telling us what became of other members of the Laffite family in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Though Davis clearly intends his book for scholars — he is the author of more than 40 books, the director of programs at the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, and more than 200 of The Pirate Laffite’s 706 pages are footnotes and bibliography — Davis has written with a clarity and a charm that should appeal to a variety of readers. He tries to offset the legend of Jean Laffite by giving us the real Laffite and by then showing us that the legend is far less interesting than the man himself.

If you like pirates or simply well-written history, take a look at The Pirates Laffite.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)