Communicating the wonders of the Arctic and its long neglected human side in a new history

Robert McGhee is not just another writer-author who dabbles in Arctic topics. He may be Canada's leading archeologist of the Far North, the Curator of Arctic Archeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. An archeologist who has conducted over thirty years of research on the ancient peoples of the Arctic, he was awarded the 2000 Massey Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, Canada's highest award for excellence in the geographical sciences.

The Last Imaginary Place has drawn significant praise from some of the top critics of the Arctic scene in both Canada and the United States. "McGhee makes us care about this precious part of the world by putting color, flesh, diversity, and particularity back into a complex history and multifaceted human geography that has often been homogenized and generalized, removed from time and objectified. This is a beautiful book and a fine testimony to McGhee?s expert and long-standing love of the Arctic." says Sherrill Grace, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, and author of Canada and the Idea of North.

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Exploring Polar Frontiers:
Mills’ long awaited historical encyclopedia of the Arctic

William J. Mills had been the ultimate resource person for anyone who was probing into the depths of Polar exploration. The librarian at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, he oversaw what was probably the largest and most inclusive collection of printed matter on the subject.
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Were Pre-Columbian Chinese at Pole in 1421?
Author says that Year China Discovered America

After years plowing through the underwaters of most of the globe’s seas, onetime Royal Navy submarine Commander Gavin Menzies has charted a new course, with an environment ever as murky as those in the depths. “Fascinating but flawed” was the Booklist review in dissecting Menzies’ thesis that Chinese fleets explored most of the world decades before Europeans voyaged to the Americas (according to the author, explorers such as Columbus already knew the Americas were there because they had access to maps based on Chinese records). Menzies even argues that Chinese colonies were planted in the Americas, disappearing from view as they mingled with indigenous populations. 
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Boreal Ties
Edited by Kim Farley Gillis and Silas Hibbard Ayer III (University of New Mexico Press)

The 1901 Erik Expedition was significant in many ways. It represented the last contact in the field between Frederuick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary. It was the occasion of the prophetic physical examination and diagnosis of Peary by Cook.

And it was a unique insight into the fascination that Arctic exploration was held by the North American public at the turn of the century, when Pole-seeking was at its best- and soon to become its worst.

In 1899 Peary, on an extended stay in his Northern Greenland Expedition, had suffered the loss of seven toes to frostbite at Fort Conger but refused to return to receive proper treatment (see Ralph Myerson, MD: “Peary’s Toes: A unique medical history of the explorer’s loss of his toes,”: Polar Priorities, 2001, p 39-40). When Josephine and their seven year-old daughter went to Greenland to persuade him to come home, the die was cast for the Peary Relief Expedition, organized in 1901.

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Book Review: The Navigator of New York Cook and Peary as central figures in a new novel by Wayne Johnston hb, 469 p. NY: Doubleday & Co. ISBN 0385507674

Canadian author Wayne Johnson has written a new novel which has part of its setting in the bustling streets of late 19th century New York to the farthest Arctic dominions of his native country. The author of the highly-acclaimed “The Colony of Unrequited Dreams” has now completed an epic story of “one man’s quest for the secret of his origins” as a theme that includes Frederick Albert Cook as the central figure in his novel.

As a young child in St. John’s, Devlin Stead and his mother, Amelia, are suddenly abandoned by his father, Dr. Francis Stead, who flees north to practice medicine among the Eskimos. Distraught by his absence, Amelia throws herself into the icy ocean from Signal Hill. Rather than return home, his father joins the American Lieutenant Peary on one of his attempts to reach the North Pole, but wanders off from camp one night and is never seen again. Now orphaned, Devlin grows up an outcast and a loner, attended to by his devoted Aunt Daphne and his taciturn physician uncle.

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The literal blizzard of Polar books and reprints in recent years offers the expected tapping of a new interest market in the history and personalities which have made the story of the ends of our earth so attractive to readers.  In fact, the quirks of publishing bring the same book in two titles, equally intriguing:  To the Ends of the Earth in Great Britain and its U S counterpart, Polar Reaches.

Author Richard Sales is a British glaciologist who by his own account has "trekked and traveled all over the world," with an affinity for the Arctic regions.  He also is a mountain climer of some accomplishments, having authored a previuos book On Top of the World, a history of the larger peaks.  Thus Sale is more than the usual "armchair" observer, and his comments may offer greater currency than others.

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The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk
by Jennifer Niven (Hyperion, $24.95)

Jennifer Niven has combined superlative narrative skills with meticulously thorough research to produce what is certainly the most complete and accurate account of the ill-fated Karluk Expedition of 1913­14. This book is based on the diaries, journals, unpublished and published manuscripts and papers of the members of the expedition, and on other pertinent material as well as public records in governmental archives. Prominently included in Niven's research is the diary of and a personal interview with William Laird McKinlay, the last surviving member of the expedition and an individual who devoted 60 years of his life to a frank and truthful presentation of the facts concerning the expedition.
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Ghosts of Cape Sabine: the Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition
by Leonard F. Guttridge (Putnam, $19.50)
reads like a suspenseful novel, with an exhaustive mass of sources used to reconstruct the story.  Alleged mutiny, cannibalism, the execution of one soldier and the loss of most of the expedition...makes "harrowing" an understatement.  
Reviewed by Ted Heckathorn. 
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Frank Wild: an Explorer's Biography
by Leif Mills (Caedmon Whitby, $25.50)
is a long-awaited biography of the explorer always known as the "number two man" in Antarctic exploration, being understudy to the giants of the golden era--Scott, Shackleton and Mawson, yet involved in more expeditions individually than any of them.  The story of this "ideal second commander" makes good reading. 
Reviewed by Russell W. Gibbons.
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Longitude: the True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time
by Dava Sobel (Penguin, $9.50)
is a great story because it reminds us that institutional ignorance and bureaucratic stupidity did not end with Galileo and in fact continues today, but the all-time horror story for scientific inquiry was centered around John Harrison, a self-educated carpenter and amateur clockmaker of the early 18th Century.  The subtitle tells it all.   
Reviewed by Jason Lockwood.
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Give Me My Father's Body:  The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo
by Kenn Harper (Steerforth Press, $24.00)
is a long deserved small press edition of a book that was first privately published in 1990.  Kenn Harper has done the research on Minik and his Greenland tribe, so cruelly exploited by American explorers and insulted in the aftermath of an institutional museum community that treated them as but inventory.  It is also a story of sheer greed and theft.  
Reviewed by Ralph Myerson.
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