Canada's bestknown storyteller advances a controversial theory that a race of Indo-Europeans called Albans preceded the Norse in North America by several centuries. The worst thing you could say about Farley's latest, which is by turns exasperating and invigorating, is that it's a wonderful yarn.
The author sails his 36 foot sailboat into a remote harbor on Bylot Island in the Canadian Arctic and there gets frozen in for the winter. A close encounter with the Arctic that ranks with the very best books on the subject.
A reprint of a splendid knockabout voyage around Cape Horn by one of America's finest artists. The book is as fresh today as it was when it was originally published over 75 years ago.
Northern Latitudes is a book of prose poems celebrating a twenty-five year romance with the Arctic and other cold, pure places.
(Available from The Oberholtzer Foundation, 300 N. Hill St, Marshall, MN, 56528)
This extremely handsome book which includes photographs, diary jottings, and essays by various hands details explorer conservationist Ernest Oberholtzer's epic 1912 canoe trip from The Pas, Manitoba, to Hudson Bay. The photos, especially, are remarkable; at once lyrical and austere, they provide an eloquent window on a lost time and a distant place, not to mention Native People who now seem almost as distant as the Stone Age. A "must" for canoeists and Arctic aficionados.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson was perhaps the fiurst anthropologist to live with his subjects. As it happens, he lived with them rather more intimately than anyone ever expected. In this extremely well-researched book, Icelandic anthropologist Gisli Palsson tells the story of Stefansson's Inuit wife Pannigabluk and their son Alex, neither of whom Stefansson - to his discredit - acknowledged during his lifetime.
Explorer Heskleth Prichard left a canoe in northern Labrador in 1910, and nearly one hundred years later Lawrence Coady went in search of it. His narrative in The Lost Canoe shines when he is dealing with his own misadventures, but seems labored when he recounts Prichard's. Still, his book contains some excellent descriptions of the Labrador outback including this one about the insects: "A ballerina in leotards would last four seconds in Labrador— but what a dance!"
Part myth, part fiction, and part family memoir,
The Chukchi Bible details the history of Siberia's Chukchi from the time when Raven created the world out of gobs of his own shit to the year 1999. But it's not only a history. It's also an elegy on the death of a traditional culture due to assaults from the outside world. I have no hesitation in calling the late Yuri Rytkheu's book a master piece. Urgently recommended to anyone with even the slightest interest in the Arctic or its Native people.
