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. (Mar. 1)
Forecast:The near-simultaneous publication of
Farley: The Life of Farley Mowat, by James King (Forecasts, Dec. 16, 2002), should help this book get some publicity.
