last reads

Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments . Eric Ames Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter When the name of Carl Hagenbeck comes up these days, it's most often in reference to his innovations in the design of zoos -- and justly so, as he was certainly the first to place animals in realistic-seeming environments. His other accomplishments, however, were far more varied -- and in certain aspects troubling -- than that. He was an early, and persistent exhibitor of humans from exotic lands; his built environments were modelled not on the actual places the animals lived, but on massive panoramas and cycloramas in which a daub of paint was as good as an iceberg; he was a pioneering maker of wildlife films, but the animals in them were most often shot and killed on camera; and perhaps most significantly, he is the only one of many such exhibitors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose establishment -- the Hamburg Tierpark ...

The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the Northwest Passage by Andrew Lambert New Haven: Yale University Press, $32.50 I've already reviewed the UK edition of Professor Lambert's book brought out by Faber & Faber earlier this year, but thought the US edition deserves at least a brief notice on its own. The book's appearance is strikingly different; in place of a bald and puffy Sir John Franklin we have Richard Brydges Beechey's luminous "HMS Erebus passing through the Chain of Bergs" from 1842. Quibblers will note that, although these were indeed Franklin's (later) vessels, the setting is the Antarctic rather than the Arctic, and some may find their greenish darkness, framed by deep olive, a bit much -- but I think it's a very handsome design, and beautifully printed. A more significant difference lies in the subtitle, and here there is an odd dissonance; given that one of Lambert's main arguments is that the Franklin ...

Polar Hayes: The Life and Contributions of Isaac Israel Hayes, M.D. Douglas W. Wamsley Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-87169-262-7 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore Douglas Wamsley has filled a glaring gap in the historiography of 19th-century polar exploration by producing the first biography of Isaac Hayes, leader of perhaps the most overlooked US Arctic expedition before the age of Cook and Peary. But Hayes’s activities extended well beyond the Arctic, and in thoroughly charting them Wamsley has given us a picture not only of Arctic exploration but of many disparate aspects of 19th-century American life. The publishers are also to be commended for producing a pleasingly solid and attractively presented volume, illustrated with photographs, engravings, well-drawn maps, and a colour plate. Isaac Hayes was born into a Quaker community in rural Pennsylvania in 1832, and the author has taken great trouble to evoke the details of what that Quaker upbringing would ha...

Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation by Andrew Lambert London: Faber & Faber, 2009 £20 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Andrew Lambert's Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation is the first new scholarly biography of Sir John Franklin in many years. How many? Well, it depends on how you count. Deadly Winter , Martyn Beardsley's 2002 biography, was more of a general-interest work, while John Wilson's lively 2001 volume, John Franklin: Traveller on Undiscovered Seas , was geared to younger readers. Before that, if one wanted a detailed biography by a naval historian one would have to reach back almost to Richard J. Cyriax's Sir John Franklin's Last Expeditio n in 1939. So there can be no doubt that the appearance of Lambert's study is an occasion for celebration among all with an interest in the strange fate of this unhappy navigator. And yet, as Franklin has come to mean so many things for so many people, it might be wise to say at the outset wh...

Our site may have been quiet for a few weeks, but the silence you hear is actually the sound of our reviewers carefully paging through some of the year's most exciting new titles of Arctic interest. With our new format, these will be published as soon as they're complete, so you won't have to wait for a full "issue" to accumulate before you can sample our latest offerings. Russell Potter is currently reading Andrew Lambert's new biography of Sir John Franklin from Faber & Faber, the first new scholarly biography in many years. Lambert, a professor of naval history at King's College, London, was featured in John Murray's documentary, Finding Franklin . Meanwhile, Kari Herbert, fresh from work on her forthcoming book The Heart of the Hero - The Women Behind Polar Explorers , will be reviewing Erika Elce's new collection of the letters of Lady Jane Franklin, As affecting the fate of my absent husband . Jonathan Dore will offer his assessment...

Wanting , by Richard Flanagan NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, $24 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Wanting is the latest, but surely not the last, in the tradition of fiction inspired by some aspect of the career of Sir John Franklin. And yet, even in this crowded field, it stands out as one of only two or three that draw fully and richly from the indigenous cultures among which Franklin sojourned, and it is the only one to take on his and Lady Jane's relationship with the aboriginal peoples of Tasmania. At the same time, by alternating this narrative with a fictionalized account of Charles Dickens's personal crises in the later 1850's -- a period which would see both the death of his youngest daughter and his separation from his wife -- he complicates the colonial landscape with a cobblestone corollary . The most unexpected figure in all of this is a tragic heroine of almost Dickensian proportions, the native Tasmanian girl Mathinna, adopted by the Franklins during their tim...

Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers Dorothy Harley Eber University of Toronto Press, 2008 ISBN (cloth): 978-0-8020-9275-5 Reviewed by David C. Woodman I have always envied Dorothy Harley Eber. Two decades ago my soon-to-be editor kindly invited me to lunch to discuss my unpublished manuscript. A charming lady named Dorothy who had a similar interest in Inuit oral history accompanied her. At that time Dorothy, unknown to me, was already famous for her groundbreaking Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life. That book was an illustrated oral biography of the Inuit artist Pitseolak Ashoona created from recorded interviews Dorothy had undertaken in 1970. She had recently completed another biography based on interviews with Peter Pitseolak eventually published as the excellent People from Our Side. Whereas I mined dusty and obscure sources for Inuit testimony collected during the nineteenth century, Dorothy actually met with living Inuit and over the years had patiently developed ...