Prisoners of the North

This book is an interesting collection of biographies about five people who are almost certainly virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans--which is understandable, since the subjects were either Canadians or folks from the U.K. whose greatest exploits took place in Canada. Most Americans would be hard-pressed to name five cities in Canada, much less five famous Canadian people. Hockey players excepted, perhaps. The late Berton covers the lives of five people: Joe Boyle, an entrepreneur in the gold rush at the turn of the Nineteenth Century and the so-called "King of the Klondike"; Vilhjamur Steffansson, a talented explorer with some unfortunately misguided theories about the Inuit; Lady Jane Franklin, the wife of Sir John Franklin who led the famous and doomed expedition of the "Erebus" and the "Terror" to find the Northwest Passage; the repulsive and possibly insane John Hornby, who kept flirting with disaster and starvation on his forays into the Barren Grounds, Canada's tundra territory, until finally he met his well-deserved fate; and Robert Service, a versifier and balladeer of whom Berton is enormously fond and who he claims, ludicrously, to have possibly been the most famous English-language poet of the Twentieth Century. In the case of Service, Berton, born in the Yukon in 1920, had a personal connection, having interviewed him for a TV special in 1958 shortly before Service's death. Indeed, Berton had many connections to the Canadian Arctic, as he reveals in many asides. His premise for this collection is that the lives of these five people became forevermore captured by the Arctic, and that in some ways they left the best parts of themselves there. Only the eccentric and incompetent Hornby actually died in the north, but the others found their fame there, and, with the exception of Lady Franklin, mentally never really left that land in some primal and essential way, no matter where their subsequent journeys took them physically. The book is copiously illustrated and contains a number of helpful maps. The most gripping section is that dealing with Hornby, since it's the only one that ends in complete and utter tragedy, which always makes for more compelling reading. Recommended for collectors of books about Arctic explorers or famous Canadians, but probably not of general interest to the average reader.

Pierre Berton an accomplished and beloved Canadian author presents here five essays on different notable characters that stand tall in the history of Canadian arctic discovery, exploration, exploitation and settlement. The author is a master of arctic history, legend and lore. His most notable works include Klondike Fever and The Arctic Grail. This effort is interesting but falls a bit short of the mastery and command that the author presented in his earlier efforts. It is notable that this work was completed in 2004 which was the last year of the author's life. It is still a worthwhile book to read for those interested in arctic history and the hardy colorful characters that accomplished early settlement and exploration of the extreme north. It is recommended that if you read this during the winter months sit close to your fireplace or woodstove.