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In Those Days: Collected Writings on Arctic History Book 1: Inuit Lives by Kenn Harper Iqaluit: Inhabit Media. $19.95 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter "In those days" is the English equaivalent of Taissumani, the name of Kenn Harper's long-running history column in the Nunatsiaq News;  this volume collects from among them those dealing with significant Inuit figures. Many of them will be well-known to anyone with an interest in Arctic histories: "Joe" Ebierbing and "Hannah" Tookoolito, guides and translators for Charles Francis Hall; John Sakeouse, an interpreter and artist who accompanied John Ross on his 1818 voyage to northwest Greenland; and Hans Hendrik, who worked with Elisha Kent Kane, Isaac Israel Hayes, and was part of the party who survived on an ice-floe for six months after being separated from Hall's Polaris . But these are only three of the twenty-eight  life-stories in these remarkable, turnable pages. Harper, who has lived and worked i

In the Shadow of the Pole: An Early History of Arctic Expeditions, 1871-1912 By S.L. Osborne Toronto: Dundurn, CDN$26.99 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter The history and status of Canada's sovereignty over its Northern possessions has been the subject of many recent studies, most of them focussing on the current geopolitical anxieties over transport  (the Northwest Passages) and potential oil and mineral claims by other circumpolar nations. There have been some excellent overviews of the issues at stake (including Shelagh D. Grant's's  Polar Imperative , previously reviewed in these pages). And yet, oddly, there has been very little detailed attention paid to the history, much of it in the time of the Dominion, of the initial efforts by Canada to evaluate, establish, and reinforce its sovereignty. S.L. Osborne's book, despite its curious title (one is not quite sure what the word "Early" is meant to signify), does a fine job of recounting these little-known expe

Lost Beneath the Ice: The Story of HMS Investigator Text by Andrew Cohen, with images from Parks Canada Toronto: Dundurn CDN$29.99 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter The story of the rediscovery of the wreck of HMS Investigator by Parks Canada in the frozen waters of Mercy Bay in July of 2010 captured the imagination of the world, and evoked the 'heroic age' of Arctic exploration in a way no other recent event has managed. In part, this is due to the way in which a ship, even in its watery grave, evokes the endeavor of exploration with far more gravity and magnificence than any recent discoveries on land have done (last summer's toothbrush, found at Erebus Bay, comes to mind). But it's also due to the fact that the Parks Canada team was uniquely positioned to undertake a thorough on-site survey of the wreck, and to transmit the news and images of their discovery via the Internet and the news media almost as they were happening. And, it should be mentioned, the chief reason t

Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles By Erkki Huhtamo. Boston, MIT Press, $45.00 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter The paramount mass-media attraction of its era, the 'moving panorama' has, until now, received only piecemeal treatment; cast in the shadow of its larger brother, the fixed, 360-dgree panorama, it has generally been regarded as an historical side-note. There have been studies of moving panoramas of certain subjects -- such as my own Arctic Spectacles -- and some of particular regions, such as Mimi Colligan's Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainment in 19th-Century Autralia and New Zealand , but no comprehensive, international consideration of the role of moving panoramas in the history of visual culture. That is, until now: Erkki Huhtamo's Illusions in Motio n not only takes up the larger histories of this medium, but documents them with an enormous number of hitherto-unseen primary-source materials. For a me

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

Nanook of the North and The Wedding of Palo , and other Films of Arctic Life Flicker Alley, $44.95 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Some years ago, I was at a conference on Arctic films at Nipissing University when I heard an intriguing paper by the Greeenlandic scholar Erik Gant . His talk took aim at the curious bifurcation in filmed portrayals of Eskimo peoples, using Robert Flaherty's 1922 Nanook of the North and Friedrich Dalsheim's 1934 The Wedding of Palo as its bookends.  The title of his talk was " Good and Bad Eskimos " -- and as I listened I realized I'd only seen half, or rather less than half of the important films depicting Inuit life, since I'd never seen, or even heard of Palo . My ignorance was remedied, in part at least, later in the conference, when we watched almost all of a 16mm print of Palo that Dr. Gant had brought with him from Denmark (the conference organizers, unforgivably, shut down the film over time concerns before it had concl