From modest beginnings in Queens, New York, Dave Rose became the first director of the Alaska Permanent Fund, the multi-billion-dollar savings account created by voters after discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay. Rose’s insider account, as told to award-winning journalist and author Charles Wohlforth, reveals the inner workings of a unique institution that converts earnings from investment of oil wealth into annual dividends for every Alaskans. Yet this book isn’t just about finance. Dave Rose loved to tell stories. His childhood recollections are reminiscent of a Neil Simon play – witty tales of an irrepressible city boy. With a partner, he starts the first kosher-style deli in Alaska. A political brawl over his principled stand on civil rights crushes a promising political career.

"This fascinating book tells how Alaska, suddenly having oil riches beyond its imagination, protected the money from free-spending politicians and shrewdly invested it in what became a $40 billion fund paying annual dividends to its citizens."
    --John Strohmeyer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Extreme Conditions: Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: DAVE ROSE (1937-2006) was the first director of the Alaska Permanent Fund, the first chairman of the Anchorage Assembly for the unified government of the city, and possibly the first Jew to open a kosher delicatessen in Alaska. Rose was a charismatic story-teller who had extraordinary warmth. CHARLES WOHLFORTH is winner of more than two dozen national, regional and state awards for writing, including the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Wohlforth’s previous writing about Alaska places and history include The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change (North Point Press -Farrar, Straus and Giroux).