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Flight to the Top of the World: the Adventures of Walter Wellman By David L. Bristow University of Nebraska Press, $29.95 (hc); $28.45 (kindle) Reviewed by P.J. Capelotti Walter Wellman is a unique figure in American journalism and exploration, comparable in some respects with Henry Morton Stanley.  However, since Wellman straddled many different fields: journalism, politics, exploration, aviation, technology, and the Polar Regions, he has been a particularly difficult individual to pin down in any one account of his life of writing and adventure.  His five expeditions in search of the North Pole from 1894-1909, along with an attempted stunt flight across the Atlantic in 1910, have long defined his life.  The present volume moves a bit closer to the goal of a full accounting but, in the end, as did Wellman himself so many times, it comes up short by failing to reach its stated goal. The strengths of this biography are also its weaknesses.  First, the revelation of new details of Wellma

At the Edge: A life in search of challenge By Stephen J. Trafton Amazon Digital Services LLC, $37.50 paperback, $7.49 eBook Reviewed by Regina Koellner To say Stephen Trafton led an interesting life would be an understatement. His achievements are many and versatile. Climbing Boulder Peak in Washington State, at the age of twelve led to an impressive career in mountain climbing, with numerous first ascents and subsequent leadership in mountain rescue.  A college job in a bank became a professional career which peaked in taking the US government to court and so saving what became Citibank. Later in life, he discovered a passion for car racing, and there he also excelled. He set the Ferrari land speed record in a car that he restored himself, and had an impressive racing career including an unsuccessful attempt to complete the Peking to Paris Rally. His passion for exploring led him across the USA on solo hikes and by kayak and on eleven expeditions to the High Arctic. His interest in th

Limits of the Known, by David Roberts. 336 pp. New York: Norton ISBN 978-0393609868 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore After half a lifetime of mountaineering, and another half of canyoneering and writing books and magazine features, David Roberts has pulled together the various threads of his life in a book that is part memoir, part historical anthology of notable exploration, and part meditation on the meaning and limits of adventure and adventuring. Its summatory and valedictory flavour come from the autobiographical element, disclosed early on, that the author is living with an aggressive cancer (he guards us against the well-meant but double-edged metaphor of “battling” or “fighting” the disease), already spread and metastasized but against which, as of late 2017 when he finished writing, he was holding his own. Each of the seven chapters of this artfully constructed book interleaves an account of one or more historical expeditions with an episode or aspect of the author’s own life that r

Thou Shalt Do No Murder by Kenn Harper Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2017. ISBN 978-1-879568-49-1 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore For more than thirty years Kenn Harper has been writing historical books and journalism that skilfully combine the archival sources available in southern Canada with the rich oral histories of the Inuit, among whom he has lived for half a century. In doing so he’s shown the journalist’s unerring instinct for finding compelling human stories that are emblematic of the cultural exchange, and often cultural collision, between the two. But he’s also shown the historian’s ability to step back from his immediate subject, seeking its roots in the longer term and the broader view, with an impressively unpartisan sympathy for all the characters, Inuit and European, who fall within his view. In 1986 he first told the story of Minik, the Inuit boy swept along in the wake of Robert Peary’s polar monomania ( Give Me My Father’s Body, republished in a new and much

Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage By Ken McGoogan Toronto: HarperCollins, 2017 Reviewed by Kenn Harper Ken McGoogan has produced yet another worthy northern book. Dead Reckoning sets out to tell, as its sub-title proclaims, “The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage.” The book is peopled with the usual suspects in the history of Arctic exploration and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage. I needn’t name them here; if you are reading this, you already know who they are.  But this book introduces other names that will be unfamiliar to many readers, even some well-versed in northern history. Their stories are the “untold stories” of the sub-title. McGoogan points out in his Prologue that orthodox history only grudgingly acknowledges non-British explorers - he specifically mentions Amundsen, Kane and Hall - as well as “short-changing” fur-trade explorers - and here he mentions Hearne, Mackenzie and Rae. He has mentioned these explorers before, of course, an

Minik, the New York Eskimo: An Arctic Explorer, a Museum, and the Betrayal of the Inuit People Havover, NH: Steerforth Press $17 (US), $20 (CA) By Kenn Harper Reviewed by Russell A. Potter This is a new, and substantially revised edition of Kenn Harper's book, which was originally titled Give Me My Father's Body: The  Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo. Originally published in 1986 by Blacklead Books in Iqaluit (then still known as Frobisher Bay), the book recounts in plain yet passionate detail the sad details of the life of Minik (or Mene) Wallace, a young boy who was among a group of Inuit brought back from northwest Greenland by Robert Peary, at the seeming behest of his sponsors, particularly Morris Jesup of the Museum of Natural History, and the anthropologist Franz Boas. The first US edition of the book came out from Steerforth in 2001; we reviewed the book in what was, at the time, only the second 'issue' of the Arctic Book Review. And we stand by everything w

From the Tundra to the Trenches By Eddy Weetaltuk Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016 $24.95 Canadian/ $27.95 US Reviewed by Kenn Harper To say that Eddy Weetaltuk lived an eventful life, unlike the lives of his fellow Inuit, is an understatement. He was born in 1932 on Strutton Island in James Bay, one of twelve children. His surname, he points out, means “innocent eyes” (and should really be spelled Uitaaluttuq). His grandfather, George Weetaltuk, was a guide for the film-maker Robert Flaherty in the making of his ground-breaking documentary, Nanook of the North . Eddy’s childhood was what one would expect for an Inuk boy growing up in the 1930s and 40s at the southern limit of traditional Inuit land, in James Bay and on the Quebec coast – periods of joy and hunger in the comfort of a large family.  He went to school in Fort George, and finished the eighth grade at boarding school. By the time he reached adulthood, he was multi-lingual, speaking English, Inuktitut, French an