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High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey
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High Latitudes: An Arctic Journey
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by Farley Mowat and Margaret Atwood
Sales Rank : 331755
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Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Steerforth; 1 edition February 10, 2003
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1586420615
ISBN-13: 978-1586420611
Product Dimensions:
9.2 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
After having written more than 35 books, most of them dealing in some fashion with the vastness of Canada's northern regions, it seems at first implausible that Mowat (Never Cry Wolf; The Farfarers; Walking on the Land; etc.) could have anything left to say on the subject. This splendid effort proves how wrong such an assumption would be. In 1966, Mowat's publisher, Jack McClelland, sent Mowat into northern Canada to research an illustrated volume on the region. This book is the tale of that journey. Hopscotching by creaky plane from one isolated settlement to another, Mowat witnesses the devastation being wrought on the native peoples by encroaching white men, lured by a mirage of the north's supposedly limitless minerals and the raw beauty of the land and its people. A cavalcade of vivid, fiction-worthy characters fills these pages: brusque missionaries, embittered native elders, soldiers drunk with cabin fever, and the tragic ghosts of the natives and early Viking explorers who once traversed these bracingly gorgeous lands. Voiced with a passionate sense of justice, this work is stirring reading from the bard of the Canadian north.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
In his books, Mowat championed the Inuit against the encroachments of the kablunait, the whites, and as a result, Canadian officialdom was never his biggest fan. In 1966, it was promoting a development scheme for the Arctic advertised as the "Northern Vision" when the famous gadfly traveled by float plane to see the vision firsthand. Mowat laid in sufficient rum for himself and his flying companions, and this medicinal aid allayed taut nerves in many a harrowing flight, recounted here in gallows humor as the author describes mountains flashing by, weather closing in, or gas running out. Clearly life in the north, even with planes and tawdry prefab housing, is precarious, and Mowat's quest asked whether their introduction as part of the vision did the Inuit any favors. Answers depended upon whom he asked, and Mowat builds his narrative around responses from Hudson's Bay Company managers, Christian missionaries, and when the kablunait were out of earshot, the Inuit themselves. Though a 36-year-old event, Mowat's trip touches on continuing environmental and cultural themes. The same great readership he built from his passion for nature and the Inuit will also be thrilled by the new biography Farley by James King (see review on p.834). Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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