Arctic & Antarctica Books

Arctic Adventure

Peter Freuchen

List Price: $76.45 By: AMS Press Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $30.68

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

One of the great adventurers and story tellers. 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Unlike many European adventurers who forced their vision upon the natives, Peter Freuchen adopted their ways. He was quite a remarkable individual. His life jumped from one life changing adventure to another. This book covers his life in the Artic, which was remarkable. Later in his life, he wrote a book which covers this material and other adventures (including Alaska, the Soviet Union) called 'Vagrant Viking'. I highly recommend that book too.

Also unlike many adventurers (such as Ernest Shackleton) Freuchen wrote incredibly well. His insights into different cultures and people and his writing style are exceptional. One passage that stood out in this book had to do with him finding out that he was going to be a father: "My whole life was changed, given impulse and purpose. Before the arrival of children a man is seldom aware of the need for them. Afterward, he can scarcely credit life as holding any interest without them." I highly recommend this book, which will be reprinted in November 2002.

Editorial Review:

An adventure classic by the famed explorer who lived among the Greenland Inuit. (SEE QUOTE.)

The Top and Bottom of the World (Rookie Read-About Science)

Allan Fowler

Amazon Price: $13.94 List Price: $20.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Children's Press (CT) Amazon Marketplace: 6 new & used starting at $4.49

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The Last Kings of Thule: With the Polar Eskimos, As They Face Their Destiny

Jean Malaurie

List Price: $17.50 By: Univ of Chicago Pr (T) Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $8.45

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Fascinating, but Qaanaaq inhabitants not so impressed. 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Fantastic background to the area both from the antropological and geographical points of veiw. However, when I visited Qaanaaq in 1990 and mentioned this book I found that the local inhabitants were not impressed by their protrayal. Particularly concerning the more private aspects of their society.

Worth the effort to find it. 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Insightful and introspective account of the author's extended study of the Polar Innuit of the Thule district in Greenland. The most recent edition includes the author's bittersweet reflections many years later on modern incursions that threaten the survival of this indigenous culture.

Accidental ethnographer 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Although the primary objectives of Malaurie's work were cartographic and geological in nature, he became, by default, a primary voice in describing the Thule culture by recounting his personal experiences and lifestyle during the expedition. Surely, ethnography can never be a truly objective effort, but Malaurie seems to appreciate this and relates cultural information through an admitted cultural filter. Rather than stifle his own reactions in his writing, Malaurie has adequately described, with sensitivity, his personal paradigm shift as well as that of the culture he is inevitably impacting by his very presence. It is inevitable that in any ethnographic description it will be found that something is amiss, lacking, due to the inevitable loss of information that occurs whenever information is transferred across cultural and linguistic lines. This work is one of the few that I have read that treats cultural interaction and exchange with dignity on behalf of the observed and the one observing. And, after all, these lines of distinction regarding observer and the observed shift and change radically during such a period of cultural interaction. Malaurie wonderfully describes this process.

GREENLAND MUMMIES

List Price: $45.00 By: Smithsonian Amazon Marketplace: 13 new & used starting at $9.36

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Fascinating view into primitive technology 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I read this book several years ago and am now buying it because I just couldn't forget it. It explains the extremely sophisticated technology of the so called "primitive people" who lived in the arctic. American and British explorers were always freezing to death with their "advanced" civilization, while these people lived and worked skillfully and in tune with their environment. It is a lovely book, well illustrated and well written, too.

North Pole Legacy: Black, White, and Eskimo

S. Allen Counter

Amazon Price: $11.66 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Invisible Cities Press Llc Amazon Marketplace: 29 new & used starting at $4.20

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Amazing Story 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I just heard this book's author on the radio, and was so impressed by him. He's a Harvard professor who got interested in the story of Matthew Henson, a black man who explored the Arctic and discovered the North Pole along with Robert Peary. The professor, Dr. Counter, has gone to the Arctic several times now, and has befriended the sons and grandsons of both Henson and Peary. Before Dr. Counter, nobody in the US even knew that these explorers had fathered children up there. And Dr. Counter has done a lot to get Henson recognition here in the States, where institutionalized racism has minimized his role in history.

Editorial Review:

Upon hearing rumors that the men who discovered the North Pole had fathered sons while on their expedition, S. Allen Counter arranged to visit the remote villages where Robert Peary, the credited discoverer, and Matthew Henson, the black man whose contributions to the expedition are widely ignored, stayed during their travels. This book recounts the astonishing story of Counter’s trips to Greenland and the relationships he develops with the Eskimo ancestors of the two men. At the same time, new evidence about Peary’s journey to the Pole is examined, and it comes to light that Henson, was the true hero.

Hula Girls and Surfer Boys

Mark Blackburn

Amazon Price: $15.56 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks By: Schiffer Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $8.95

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Editorial Review:

Hula and surfing represent the quintessential Hawaiian experience. Over 270 original photographs and postcard images are presented chronologically from 1870 to 1940 to powerfully portray the evolving styles and popularity of these icons of Hawai`i. The Hula and surfing traditions both are deeply rooted in legend and myth and Hula dancing was actually outlawed for over 60 years. Surfboards were highly prized by the ancients and the sport became reserved for Hawai`i's kings. These enchanting images include famous personalities like Duke Kahanamoku, as well as unknown practitioners of their arts.

Into the Ice: The Story of Arctic Exploration

Lynn Curlee

Amazon Price: $12.48 List Price: $16.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Houghton Mifflin Amazon Marketplace: 45 new & used starting at $0.34

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Editorial Review:

Alien and wild, the far north has the powerful allure of the unknown, a call explorers have heeded for hundreds of years. First came the search for a route through the polar icecap to the rich lands of Asia. The Northeast and Northwest Passages were painstakingly traced. Then the race was on to one of the remotest points on earth - the North Pole. The desire for knowledge, wealth, adventure, and fame fueled expedition after expedition. Some Arctic explorers met with success and celebrity; others found madness and death; a few simply disappeared. Into the Ice, graced with majestic acrylic paintings, traces the slow unveiling of the secrets of this mysterious and forbidding frozen region.

Voyage to Greenland

Frederica De Laguna

By: W W Norton & Co Ltd Amazon Marketplace: 15 new & used starting at $0.37

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Editorial Review:

In 1929, Frederica de Laguna accompanied Dr. Therkel Mathiassen, a Danish archaeologist and Arctic explorer, to Greenland to make the first archaeological survey ever undertaken there. The expedition was to take them to unexplored territory where they hoped to discover what had been the culture of the first Eskimo inhabitants. In this book, comprised mostly of a journal and letters to her family, de Laguna tells of her experiences in a Greenland that is now completely gone. Informal, engaging, wonderfully descriptive and informative, the account is full of the excitement and adventure of the opportunity of a lifetime. De Laguna tells of daily life on the island of Inugsuk, setting up camp, the clothes made of sealskin, seal hunting from kayaks, falling asleep to the sound of icebergs knocking against the shore, the hard physical work of digging, and the thrill of discovery of the first significant specimen.

Icy heritage: The historic sites of the Ross Sea region, Antarctica

David L Harrowfield

By: Antarctic Heritage Trust Amazon Marketplace: 2 new & used starting at $29.50

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Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo

Kenn Harper

List Price: $24.00 By: Steerforth Press Amazon Marketplace: 77 new & used starting at $0.33

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

At last returning to print, Give Me My Father's Body is the thought-provoking tale of Minik, a young Inuit boy brought to New York by Robert Peary around the turn of the 20th century. Told simply and interspersed with personal letters and newspaper clippings, the book examines Minik's life both as a cross-cultural meeting place and a deeply personal search for a place to call "home." Photographs throughout of Minik give a glimpse into the incredible differences between the multiple worlds he inhabited, and how impossible it must have been to live in these worlds successfully. The title derives from one of Minik's more harrowing experiences--finding his father's bones displayed in a natural-history museum as a "curiosity"--and his attempts to retrieve the bones for a more respectful burial. Author Kenn Harper, while including many facts and articles about Arctic exploration, refrains from sharing opinions about the various explorers or their methods, choosing to share this story--and his years of research--plainly. From the death of Minik's birth father to the financial ruin of his American foster family, the events of Minik's childhood seem like one disaster after another, and his adulthood--the successful return to Greenland, followed by disappointment and a subsequent return to New York--is an unhappy struggle to find some kind of personal fulfillment. Questions of racial and cultural differences make an inescapable larger framework for Minik's life, and the emotions brought forward in answering those questions make reading this book a powerful experience. --Jill Lightner