On Borrowed Time is a literary, historical snapshot of an Alaska Gold Rush boomtown going ghost because of corruption - not the gold running out. It is allegorical of what is happening today when the "bad guys" are “too big to jail.” A novel of interlocking, first-person vignettes, it is a three-year look at the nail-biting, day-to-day drama focused on how the rich legally squeeze out the middle and working class. The Alaska Gold Rush is the least-studied era in American history. Most Americans - and too many Alaskans - believe the Klondike Rush in Dawson, the Yukon Territory, in Canada, is the Alaska Gold Rush. They are in error.  

The Klondike Rush was only about 18 months in length and covered about 100 square miles. The Alaska Gold Rush started in 1880 and lasted until the end of the First World War - and covered an area one-fifth the size of the lower 48 states. Almost all of the boomtowns of the Alaska Gold Rush went ghost, and On Borrowed Time is an up-close look at what the boomtowns had to face to stay alive. 

The author, Steven Levi, is an Alaska Gold Rush scholar. He has more than 80 books in print and on Kindle including the only composite history of the Alaska Gold Rush, Boom and Bust in The Alaska Gold Fields, and a footnoted The Human Face of The Alaska Gold Rush. He has two other literary snapshots of Alaska Gold Rush communities, Best Boots I Ever Ate which reveals how small towns can be "set up" for white collar theft and Judge Xenopohon Atchison and the Foxworthy Cabal, how a small, Alaska Gold Rush town fought back against corruption.