Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo

Minik's story is one you will never forget. Kenn Harper has lived among the Inuit people for some 30 years, and his treatment of Minik's life story is both enthralling and starkly simple. There are many kind and cruel people who become involved in Minik's life, but only a few really cared about him as a person. Many were only interested in his people as "cultural artifacts" and as literal side-show attractions to make money.The book explores both sides of Minik's world: his homeland in Greenland, and that of his new life in America. The author effectively shows the dire consequences when these two worlds will not mesh together, and Minik is left as a man with no country, in the most literal sense of the word. Once you start reading his story, you won't want to put it down. Read it then recommend it to everyone you know!

Thank heavens someone found this book and had it reprinted for the rest of us to read! It would have been such a waste of a wonderful writer and an interesting story if others had not had an opportunity to enjoy this. As written in this book when reading history, Carl Sagan said we need to remember to put the people in context of the social norms of the society they lived in. However, kindness never goes in and out of fashion, and this was well illustrated by the people, both good and bad, whom Minik had the unfortunate luck to fall in with. I knew from what little I had seen of Peary, that he was like many men and explorers of that period...egotistical, vain, pompous, full of himself, and oblivious to others. I did not realize how far these traits of his affected others. The absolute gall of this man to place the lives of other human beings in danger, which he most certainly knew he would be doing if he brought the Polar Eskimos to New York, is beyond infuriating. It is with great patience that Harper writes this book. As you can see, I would hardly be so magnanimous. Peary does not deserve any accolades for anything he did. He totally deserves to be relagated to the dusty corners of museums to which Peary left the family of Minik!Harper does a wonderful job of writing. I have rarely read a biography or history book that reads as easily as a novel, as this book does. Perhaps it is the topic that is so interesting, but the author does such a complete job of telling the story with little biased or prejudiced input. He lets Minik's own words speak for themselves about how he felt about the situation he had been placed in. The book is void of speculation or assumptions that are often made by those writing history or biographies...no Freudian or other psychological analyzation is done on any of the characters in this story, even if the reader is wondering what the heck these guys were thinking or even if they were thinking!Harper tells the whole story of the people involved even if detrimental to their memories. I have to say that even though Minik's foster father had done some things considered wrong in the eyes of the world (he played fast and furious with museum and business interests), in the end he did as much as he could to help his foster son, and certainly did much more than Peary or the other scientific nincompoops did. Karen L. Sadler, Science Education, University of Pittsburgh

As Kevin Spacey says in his foreword, "there is not a page in this book without its horrors and wonders." When I read a description of this book in a newspaper article - a six-year-old Eskimo boy who is brought to New York in 1897 by Robert Peary, then abandoned by Peary when the adults in the group become ill, and in effect set adrift when he is orphaned - I thought this tale in itself sounded interesting. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover the book to be far richer, with more interestng characters and unexpected twists and turns than I ever could have imagined. Though the book has many new and revealing things to say about famous figures from the goldn age of polar exploration and is the first major book I know to tell its story from the perspective of the indigenous Inuit, it is largely a fascinating period piece from turn-of-the-century New York City. The characters reveal themseles slowly, as in the best fiction; Mr. Harper has done a world class job of fleshing out the details, and his unadorned writing style allows the focus to remain on his characters and story, where it belongs. I couldn't put this book down, and still can't stop talking about it to friends.

I might not have discovered this book if Kevin Spacey hadn't decided to buy the film rights and write a forword to the new edition. This well-written, meticulously researched history has left me almost breathless. If you are at all disposed to history, biography, anthropology, or any other study of human nature and experience, do read this book. As Harper recounts the events of Minik's life, the age of Polar discovery draws nearer to the present day. I stopped at times to wonder how far we've come in understanding people different from ourselves, in respecting not just the "idea" of diversity, but diversity itself. As we embrace the fashions, foods, even religions of other cultures, I hope we are not losing sight of what lies beneath our differences: an undeniable similarity, a shared distinction that I can only describe as the fundamental nobility of humanity.

The story of Minik, a young Inuk who was taken from his home in Greenland by Peary along with several adult Inuit, is told with tremendous feeling and clarity by Nunavut author Kenn Harper. Minik, whose father was "studied" by anythropologists even as he was dying of tuberculosis, was left an orphan, and further subjected to the horrible deception of a sham burial conducted with a coffin filled with stones, while his father's body was displayed as a human specimen in the Museum of Natural History. Among those who 'studied' his father was Arthur Kroeber, the so-called "discoverer" of Ishi, and father of novelist Ursula K. LeGuin.Harper tells this tragic story with remarkable control, and Kevin Spacey contributes a brief but engaging foreword to the book, which he is working to make into a motion picture.