best site to purchase books

Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition By Heather Davis-Fisch NY: Palgrave Macmillan, $85 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Books on various aspects of the Franklin expedition have been a staple here at the Arctic Book Review since our very first issue nearly fourteen years ago; we've reviewed biographies of Franklin, volumes of Inuit testimony , the lives of Franklin officers , those who searched for him, and of Lady Franklin , along with novels and poems inspired by these events. There's a great body of conventional historical and biographical material on the subject, enough to fill a lifetime's study -- but what has been wanting has been a book which fully examines the cultural impact and lasting significance of the narratives that have clustered around this history, its mythologies (in the full Barthean sense). Aside from Margaret Atwood's (still brilliant) lecture "Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew" (publi

The Ambitions of Jane Franklin, Victorian Lady Adventurer By Alison Alexander Allen & Unwin. 294pp.  AU $35 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter For all her enormous stature -- her inspiring of three dozen search expeditions for her missing husband, her persuasive powers over Presidents and Prime Ministers, and her eponymous ballad, Lady Jane Franklin has remained a difficult subject for biographers and historians. It's not that she left no documentation -- between her own letters and journals (extensive, though her handwriting is infamously close and difficult to read) and those of her niece Sophy Cracroft, there's ample material -- it's just that, between the private woman who emerges in these manuscripts, and the public figure so dominant that her apartments opposite the Admirality's headquarters were dubbed "The Battery," there seems at times a strange gap. Not only that, but even with all the material available, there a second, perhaps unbridgeable gap betwe