A moving account of science devastatingly and thoughtlessly misapplied, one of the countless tragedies visited on Native...
A strange, well-recounted tale of scientific arrogance and cultural misunderstanding.
In 1897 the fame-hungry Arctic explorer Robert Peary arrived in northwestern Greenland, the domain of supposedly “wild— Eskimos, to reconnoiter the country and recruit talented hunters to guide him to the North Pole. He carried with him a note from the anthropologist Franz Boas, a leading scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, that implored Peary to “bring a middle-aged Eskimo to stay here over the winter. This would enable us to obtain leisurely certain information which will be of the greatest scientific importance.” Peary satisfied Boas’s request, returning to New York with six “live Eskimo specimens”: five adults, along with a young boy named Minik. Four of the adults, including Minik’s father, soon died of colds that had turned into pneumonia. Minik remained in New York for the next 12 years, a pet of high society, isolated from his culture and possessed of a terrible knowledge: that his father’s body had been carefully dismembered, analyzed, and then put on display in a skeleton case in the museum’s exhibit hall. Boas, Harper writes, then staged a fake burial “to appease the boy, and keep him from discovering that his father’s body had been chopped up,” an act of deception in which he saw “nothing particularly deserving severe criticism.” Minik finally was allowed to return to Greenland, but, having forgotten much of his people’s customs and language, was as much an outsider there as in New York. He eventually returned to the US, where he died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Harper, a writer and teacher who has lived in Eskimo country for more than 30 years, writes sympathetically but unsentimentally, although his disgust is abundant. He has done his homework well in ferreting out this forgotten episode, however, one that will likely turn a few readers” stomachs as well.
A moving account of science devastatingly and thoughtlessly misapplied, one of the countless tragedies visited on Native America.Pub Date: April 9, 2000
ISBN: 1-883642-53-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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