Far from Home: An Alaskan Senator Faces the Extreme Climate of Washington, D.C.

The Republican senator from Alaska offers a candid reflection on her toughest decisions and biggest electoral battles in her debut memoir. Murkowski charts her unique senatorial career, from her hesitant entry in 2002, appointed by her governor father (“people don’t believe me when I say I didn’t want an appointment”), through her historic 2010 write-in victory. Though her independent-mindedness had already been well-established as a member of the Alaska legislature (she was a pro-choice Republican), Murkowski traces her developing position in the Senate—“so often in the middle, standing up to the extremes”— through some of her most contentious votes, including against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and in opposition to calling witnesses during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. However, the memoir is most illuminating when Murkowski reflects on her commitment to addressing the distinctive needs of Alaskans, particularly destitute rural Native communities, and on the “cultural chasm” between Alaska and Washington, including the latter’s shockingly overt misogyny and “bubble of affluence” in which elites are insulated from “the poverty of the city’s majority people of color.” Murkowski pegs the widening division between left and right as only offering “rhetoric” and “failure,” an argument strengthened by her own mea culpa over her embrace of divisiveness as a young senator, when she “call[ed] every environmentalist an extremist.” As a warning against the hazards of partisanship, this feels notably sincere. (June)