Salamina

Rating:
Summary: Launched in Truth . . .
Review: Observe Rockwell Kent's hand-printed notes on the Frontispiece, and you will see the legend: "This is Salamina -- apparently hanging out nothing but a clothes pin. If I had given her wash it would have covered up her hands. She always tried to cover them, for they were working hands. This book permits of no concealment."

The book, thus launched in truth, combines Kent's pen and ink chapter-head sketches, full-length portraits of native friends, and engaging text that transport the reader through the icy climes of Greenland in a year-long adventure beginning in 1931. Along the way, Kent describes the hospitality of Greenlanders, which he found humbling and at times frustrating. Readers will discover that many of his stories hold a chuckle or two, if not a good belly-laugh. Salamina, his widowed housekeeper, is the heroine, but main figures in the book are people who gave to him and stole from him. The book is social anthropology, crisply and entertainingly served, of a people and their ways, now gone forever.

The Foreword by Kent-archivist Scott R. Ferris anticipates your first question. Ferris quotes two reviewers when the book first appeared in 1935: Lewis Gannett of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that Salamina "has in it a moving sense of wonder of the virgin universe, the dignity of mountains and of sea, and a rarely intimate picture of Greenlanders at play." A review for The New Yorker opined Kent's "style is abrupt, rhapsodic, hearty . . . it is good anthropology and even better adventure narrative." Said Ferris: "This is why Kent's sagas continue to be reissued."