Rating: 
Summary: Impressive account of north meeting civilization.
Review: Thank heavens someone found this book and had it reprinted for the rest of us to read! It would have been such a waste of a wonderful writer and an interesting story if others had not had an opportunity to enjoy this. As written in this book when reading history, Carl Sagan said we need to remember to put the people in context of the social norms of the society they lived in. However, kindness never goes in and out of fashion, and this was well illustrated by the people, both good and bad, whom Minik had the unfortunate luck to fall in with. I knew from what little I had seen of Peary, that he was like many men and explorers of that period...egotistical, vain, pompous, full of himself, and oblivious to others. I did not realize how far these traits of his affected others. The absolute gall of this man to place the lives of other human beings in danger, which he most certainly knew he would be doing if he brought the Polar Eskimos to New York, is beyond infuriating. It is with great patience that Harper writes this book. As you can see, I would hardly be so magnanimous. Peary does not deserve any accolades for anything he did. He totally deserves to be relagated to the dusty corners of museums to which Peary left the family of Minik!Harper does a wonderful job of writing. I have rarely read a biography or history book that reads as easily as a novel, as this book does. Perhaps it is the topic that is so interesting, but the author does such a complete job of telling the story with little biased or prejudiced input. He lets Minik's own words speak for themselves about how he felt about the situation he had been placed in. The book is void of speculation or assumptions that are often made by those writing history or biographies...no Freudian or other psychological analyzation is done on any of the characters in this story, even if the reader is wondering what the heck these guys were thinking or even if they were thinking! Harper tells the whole story of the people involved even if detrimental to their memories. I have to say that even though Minik's foster father had done some things considered wrong in the eyes of the world (he played fast and furious with museum and business interests), in the end he did as much as he could to help his foster son, and certainly did much more than Peary or the other scientific nincompoops did. Karen L. Sadler, Science Education, University of Pittsburgh
Rating:
Summary: An unforgettable story
Review: The story of Minik, a young Inuk who was taken from his home in Greenland by Peary along with several adult Inuit, is told with tremendous feeling and clarity by Nunavut author Kenn Harper. Minik, whose father was "studied" by anythropologists even as he was dying of tuberculosis, was left an orphan, and further subjected to the horrible deception of a sham burial conducted with a coffin filled with stones, while his father's body was displayed as a human specimen in the Museum of Natural History. Among those who 'studied' his father was Arthur Kroeber, the so-called "discoverer" of Ishi, and father of novelist Ursula K. LeGuin. Harper tells this tragic story with remarkable control, and Kevin Spacey contributes a brief but engaging foreword to the book, which he is working to make into a motion picture.
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