Stepping Stones to Nowhere: the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy, 1867-1945.(Book Review)

Stepping Stones to Nowhere: The Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy, 1867-1945, by Galen Roger Perras. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2003. xvi, 274 pp. $85.00 US (cloth), $24.95 US (paper).

This is a good book. There area number of reasons for that. The research is thorough, wide-ranging, and original. The writing is clear, precise, and cogent. The topic is innovative without being ridiculously revisionist or provocative only for the sake of provoking. And finally, Perras has situated the American topic neatly into the complicated folds of America's relationship with Imperial Great Britain and Canada, the Dominion and fledgling autonomous state.

Taking the last point first, Perras has avoided the blind and narrow Canadian nationalist approach, for so long a mainstream of unthinking or unquestioning students produced in the Granatstein and Mortenson sausage factories that used to pass for serious …