NONFICTION - June 27, 1993

EXTREME CONDITIONS: Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska by John Strohmeyer (Simon & Schuster: $23; 287 pp.). We know the basic battle lines: On one side are the environmentalists who want, in the words of their opponents, “to turn all Alaskans into park managers”; on the other, the miners of the “black gold,” who seem far less successful at containing their oil than they are at keeping the $110 billion in revenues it has generated since 1978 from the hands of native Alaskans. But while the conflict may be familiar, we read on anyway, for John Strohmeyer avoids the predictable partisanship that is common in books about labor and management. (It is a skill he no doubt honed in his 28 years as editor of the paper in Bethlehem, Pa., a steel town where labor-management conflicts droned on without surcease.) The disheartened, suspicious clans Strohmeyer vividly profiles here are as dark in their sensibility as the land is white, from young Eskimo males caught in a wave of suicide to a governor who is on record for having described the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--a complex ecosystem of polar bears, caribou, tundra, rivers and rolling hills--as a “flat, crummy place.”