last reads

Cold Front: Conflict Ahead in Arctic Waters by David Fairhall NY: Counterpoint, $26.00 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter In the wake of a new near-record ice minimum in the summer of 2011, there is likely to be an increased flow of portentious, dramatically-titled books warning us about the future of the Arctic -- too many for even the most voracious of concerned readers. Some, such as Shelagh Grant's excellent Polar Imperative , will focus on questions of sovereignty; others, such as Roman Shumenko's Arctic Oil and Gas , will look at these resources (and the environmental hazards of retrieving them); still others will address the impact of warming on indigenous peoples, wildlife, or coastlines. So it is quite natural to feel overwhelmed, the more so at a point where the troubled economies of so many nations around the world have added to the list of urgent concerns already facing us in the more populated temperate zones. But the problem at the top of the world is very unlikely ...

The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism by Denise Blake Oleksijczuk Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press $29.95 (paper) $90.00 (cloth) Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Those familiar with the earliest Panoramas exhibited by Robert Barker and his son Henry Aston Barker will know why a review of this book appears here, in the Arctic Book Review : the very first panorama of the Arctic, depicting his Majesty's ships "Dorothea" and "Trent" in Spitzbergen , was shown at their London venue in 1819-1820. This places it at the very end of the period covered in this lovely new book, which stretches from 1789 to 1821, and of course also makes this book an ideal introduction to the form, execution, and subject matter of the earliest great circle panoramas that preceded it. Never before have these enormous paintings -- not a one of which survives -- been given this kind of detailed accounting. Too often, in both books and online publications, one sees th...

There's no question that Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, is a potent and persistent media innovator, ever building new and surprising bridges between sight and sound, dada and data, academic and popular worlds. A typical Spooky project has at least three media arms: a multimedia performance, a musical mixtape, and a graphical interface, whether virtual or concrete; it can be attended as a performance, popped into a pod, and slid onto a shelf. His Book of Ice is one part of such a project, complementing his remarkable Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica suite. Unfortunately, it's the weaker part; without the visual and musical motion of his performance piece, the book seems strangely static and immobile. There are a couple of brief, somewhat inscrutable introductions by scientists, a typically wide-ranging tour-de-force essay by Spooky himself, and a couple of interviews. There's some interesting stuff in each of them -- I was especially fascinated by...

The world of e-books, in many ways, is as much an unexplored region as was the Arctic a century and a half ago. Will people be willing to pay for a virtual product with cold hard cash? And will electronic "books," so-called, ever be able to do the things that old-fashioned paper books have always done -- be loaned to a friend, donated to a library, or bequeathed to one's offspring? While the jury is still out on such issues, there is certainly one realm in which the e-book fills a much-needed role: in bringing books back into availability when their original publishers have decided to allow the title to fall out of print. And no such book is more welcome here than John Wilson's North With Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames , which was first reviewed in these virtual pages nearly eleven years ago here . For those who can't readily lay hand on a used copy of the lovely Fitzhenry and Whiteside hardcover, there is an easy alternative, as Wilson's no...

As affecting the fate of my absent husband: Selected Letters of Lady Franklin concerning the search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 1848-1860. Edited, and with an introduction and Notes, by Erika Behrisch Elce Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. $39.95 Lady Jane Franklin was, in many ways, a more public figure -- and a more successful one -- than her famously missing husband Sir John. She deployed so many rhetorical fusillades from her residence in Pall Mall that it became commonly known as "The Battery," and although her quest was, in the end, only partly successful, it was with some justice that The Times could refer to her as "our English Penelope." The past two decades have seen dozens of books on the final Franklin expedition, but only a very few have focused directly on the woman at whose call more than 36 ships were launched into uncharted Arctic waters. Penny Russell's 2003 book This Errant Lady uses Jane's journals and letters ...

Although some of us here at the Arctic Book Review take a dim view of the place we like to call "the other pole," there's no denying that this region of the earth, nearly as much as the North, has had a deep and abiding attraction to writers of fiction. The granddaddy of them all, of course, is Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which combines elements of exploration narrative, memoir, and fantasy so effectively that Poe's British publisher initially believed it to be a factual account. Pym ends on a strange, ambiguous note, in a region where the water runs white and a mysterious pale figure appears but does not speak. The apparent lack of resolution is "explained" in an editorial note by Poe, who says that "Pym" unhappily died before being able to complete his narrative, which of course has not prevented others from taking up where Poe left off. H.P. Lovecraft, in his At the Mountains of Madness (1936) imagines an archaeolog...

Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America By Shelagh D. Grant Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre $39.95 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Canada's sovereignty over its Arctic territory has been a hot-button issue of late, the more so under the government of Steven Harper. The sight of live-fire interdiction drills, flag-plantings on Hans Island, and the flying of a government minister for a live video at the site of the rediscovery of HMS Investigator in Mercy Bay are all signs of how central the issue has become. And yet, while willing to put out a good deal of money and resources for such shows of force, the federal government of Canada has shown much less interest in supporting the social and infrastructure needs of its Arctic inhabitants, particularly the Inuit. How did this state of affairs come about? With her new book, Polar Imperative , Shelagh D. Grant provides an eloquent and well-documented answer. And, as it turns out, the Harper government is fa...