Rating: 
Summary: Minik....could have been more
Review: I recently finished reading Kenn Harper's book, "Give me My Father's Body", a book with a fascinating story that was not particularly told well. Perhaps it is Mr. Harper's rather basic writing style that allowed me to put this book down every now and again or the fact that he did not relate his subject's life in a terribly empathetic way. Minik, in the author's eyes, ranged from being an poor eskimo who was taken advantage of, to one being an astute manipulator. I was never quite certain which Minik he was talking about and in the end, I had no feelings for Minik one way or another. I had a hard time believing that Minik's presence in America was as important as the author tried to relate. Curiously, the man who comes to life most in Mr. Harper's book is Admiral Robert Peary and the author adds to history's further debunking of Peary's claims that the admiral was the first to reach the North Pole. But to tie Minik as closely and as importantly to Peary as Mr. Harper tries to do is a bit of a stretch. The title, too, is somewhat misleading. "Give me my father's body", Minik's attempt to retrieve his father's remains from the Museum of Natural History, plays a fairly small role in the book. It is shown as a sidelight in the saga of Minik's life....a story I hope will be better told in Kevin Spacey's movie.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent book on an unbelievable story!
Review: I'd read this book years ago and it's very pity that it's out of print for the moment! It should be reprinted right away! The author tell us the story of Minik who gives us an example what our civilisation did to people who were not able to protect themselves against the modern world. This story took place end of last century but also nowadays we have not learned our lessons in respecting natural life all over the world. The book is one more try to bring more respect in our doings!
Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing...... sad
Review: Kenn Harper has managed to bring together an amazing story through detailed research. Minik, the Polar Eskimo child, was brought to the US by Robert Peary and essentially placed on display. The story of his disconnected life is full of pathos and sorrow. Yet Harper weaves the story with life.Peary's behaviors were simply egotistic and reprehensible. He treated the Eskimos as his property. He placed their lives in harms' way by bringing them to a culture and location that assaulted their senses and immune systems. Minik was the price paid for that deed. I did get bogged down in names from time to time, especially as Harper recounted the financial misdealings of Wallace, who had taken responsibility for Minik. But overall, the story is entertaining and enlightening. It speaks to the ethnocentrism of Peary's generation and to the isolation of the Polar Eskimos. It took me a long time to read and absorb this book but it was rewarding in the end... to see and feel a culture so far away.
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing...... sad
Review: Kenn Harper has managed to bring together an amazing story through detailed research. Minik, the Polar Eskimo child, was brought to the US by Robert Peary and essentially placed on display. The story of his disconnected life is full of pathos and sorrow. Yet Harper weaves the story with life. Peary's behaviors were simply egotistic and reprehensible. He treated the Eskimos as his property. He placed their lives in harms' way by bringing them to a culture and location that assaulted their senses and immune systems. Minik was the price paid for that deed. I did get bogged down in names from time to time, especially as Harper recounted the financial misdealings of Wallace, who had taken responsibility for Minik. But overall, the story is entertaining and enlightening. It speaks to the ethnocentrism of Peary's generation and to the isolation of the Polar Eskimos. It took me a long time to read and absorb this book but it was rewarding in the end... to see and feel a culture so far away.
Rating:
Summary: A Sad, Short Life
Review: Kenn Harper's biography of Minik Peary Wallace was a fascinating look at not just the sad life of a young Eskimo brought to this country as a "specimen" but also provided a unique perspective of the society which allowed it to happen. They may have been referred to as the "good old days," but in the day and age when circuses toured the country with freaks, the "acquisition" of 'primitive' people by institutions such as New York's Museum of Natural History was only marginally more respectable. (In my humble opinion.) Minik, who was just seven years old when brought to New York City from his native Greenland along with his father and four others, quickly fell ill, but unlike all but one of the others --lived. The other survivor returned to Greenland within the year, but Minik remained behind to be raised by the Museum's Supervisor of Buildings as an adopted son. That the museum arranged a "burial" of Minik's father, but in reality kept the bones for display, was just one of many deceptions Minik was saddled with over the years. As a word of warning. Don't expect to sail through a reading of this book. The names alone* will slow you down. Not that that's a bad thing: Think of it like driving on cobblestones. You're forced to go slowly, but you get to enjoy the view. Photographs interspersed throughout the text helped to bring things a little more to "life." * Names such as Aleqasinnguaq, Nukappiannguaq, Qisunnaguaq, Atangana, Angutilluarsuk, and Taliilannguaq to name a few. They don't really roll off the tounge!
Rating:
Summary: Slight annoyances didn't ruin the book
Review: Kenn Harper's Give Me My Father's Body is undeniably and superbly researched; easily the book's crowning achievement. Occasionally though, I was annoyed with the "what if" scenarios. At least twice in the book Harper says what would have happened if things had gone another way. In one instance, the book describes Minik's plan to return to the Greenland and to lead a group of Inuit to the North Pole. He hoped to attain international honour for his people. Harper made the declaration that even had Minik tried, there was no way that he would have been successful. He further added that Minik's desire to prove the superiority of his race was an ethnocentric idea no doubt learned from the white people of New York, that the Greenland Inuit would balk at such ideas and that, with nothing to gain but glory for their people, they would surely refuse to help Minik. Even if Harper's learned ethnocentrism theory is correct, Harper has no way of ever knowing what Minik could have accomplished had he tried. If Minik had learned such ideas from white people, who's to say the Greenland Inuit wouldn't in turn learn such ideas from Minik? The point is, no one knows what would have happened and it is futile to guess (even for the well-informed). Also, the edition of the book that I have, has included discussion questions at the end for readers groups. These are very laughable. To paraphrase a typical question, "Kenn Harper lives among the people that he writes about and is therefore the greatest historian and writer to ever write about Northern peoples. Discuss how his portrayal of Eskimos is the most accurate description ever to be put on paper." But despite the embarrassing readers club guide at the end and the occasional subjective statement from Harper, the book is eye-opening about the victims of science and was a pleasurable read.
Rating:
Summary: Kenn Harper's "Minik" Preserves Important History
Review: Minik's life story is one which many in the United States, including the rich and powerful, would rather have forgotten or even brushed aside; however through his careful research in the United States, Canada and Greenland, Kenn Harper has been able to rediscover the true facts, separate them from the fictions (some deviously intentional), and leave this lasting memorial to Minik and his Polar Eskimo relatives and community who suffered so much under the exploitation of Western explorers during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. This book is in itself a victory for having been instrumental in at least partially righting one of those wrongs, albeit so belatedly as the 1990s. Well written, with a stunning interweave of history from both oral Inuit sources (some primary) and documentary archival materials from Canada and the United States, Harper has given us a poignant and important book which shouldn't be missed.
Rating:
Summary: a truly heartbeaking story of loss and identity
Review: Minik's story is one you will never forget. Kenn Harper has lived among the Inuit people for some 30 years, and his treatment of Minik's life story is both enthralling and starkly simple. There are many kind and cruel people who become involved in Minik's life, but only a few really cared about him as a person. Many were only interested in his people as "cultural artifacts" and as literal side-show attractions to make money. The book explores both sides of Minik's world: his homeland in Greenland, and that of his new life in America. The author effectively shows the dire consequences when these two worlds will not mesh together, and Minik is left as a man with no country, in the most literal sense of the word. Once you start reading his story, you won't want to put it down. Read it then recommend it to everyone you know!
Rating:
Summary: The skeleton in Franz Boas' closet
Review: Published by Blacklead Books (Frobisher Bay, NWT, Canada, 275 pages) in 1986, this is the true story of six Eskimos that Admiral Robert Peary brought to the USA from Greenland in 1897, and especially the biography of Minik (age 7). To put it bluntly, they were kidnapped. It was Franz Boas, then eager for data, who asked Admiral Peary to bring back an Eskimo. Boas, the godfather of American anthropology, was then the assistant curator of the American Museum of Natural History (pp. 32-33). The six arrived in NY City on October 1st, and were housed in the basement of the Museum. By November 1st, all six were sick with pneumonia and in the Bellevue Hospital. Minik's father died first, of tuberculosis, on February 17, 1898, leaving him an orphan. (His mother had died in Greenland.) Anthropologist A.L. Kroeber (then age 21) also studied these Eskimos in 1897, under Boas. Three more soon died (coughing blood), and the last adult was sent back to Greenland. Minik remained behind in NY. Minik died in New Hampshire in 1918 of influenza at age 28. Minik remains today the "skeleton in the closet" of not only Peary and Kroeber, but above all of Boas and American anthropology. Alas, it was a different world then. Human rights for indigenous peoples was unknown, then, evidently even in anthropology.
Rating:
Summary: I've read much better
Review: Storyline is very intriguing, but the writing is a bit droll. It is also longer than necessary.
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