Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Contains primary source material.

This book from 1927 is a gem for its gentle yet mocking and ultimately devastating humor. Although the details and sometimes the turns of speech may be antiquated, the general lines of attack remain strong. If the reader will supply current equivalents for the references of a bygone age, he or she will find that what Stefansson is mocking are the monsters of today ─ in utero. That is, the corporations, the commercials, the products that would make us clean and healthy, the obligatory holidays, the worry about and exploitation of children, the busybody church with its invisible god, the mass-media entertainment complex. Stefansson the Icelandic explorer, the Canadian citizen, the leftist radical, steps out of the frozen retreats, casting a disparaging eye on the nonsense of the early American consumer society and saying a few choice words about the absurd myths it propagates.

History of the island since its discovery by the Vikings.

Originally written for inclusion in the author's Unsolved mysteries of the Arctic, 1938, but omitted for fear of libel action.

Describes the potential for economic development of arctic regions.

Series of longish essays -- but with humor and punch and imagination that takes them, out of the conventional essay class. His thesis is that fact is not always fact, nor truth always good. He discusses the educational system showing where it is at fault, and where right. He raises the question as to whether or not explorers will soon be an extinct species -- and argues no. He discusses travelers' tales, the phony Eskimo episode, Mencken's great bathtub hoax, and various explorers of the Far North. Good entertainment.

The timing of this tremendous book, the history of the Northwest Passage by the author of The Friendly Arctic and one of America's most famous explorers, could scarcely be improved: on his last page he remarks ""for all this writer knows, both the USA and the USSR may have crossed the Arctic Sea (by submarine) by the time this volume is published, ""- a project, first envisioned in 1648, which was accomplished in this August of 1958! The ""sailor dream"" of centuries, ""The near way to the Far East is North,"" actually started with the ""globular thinking"" of the ancients and with their explorations, the knowledge of which was passed on through the years. In the 6th century navigators had sighted Greenland's glaciers; by the 9th century the Vikings were colonizing Iceland and sailing westward to North America. When in 1299 Marco Polo published the story of his journey to China the real impetus for the discovery of a passage to Cathay began, a dream which never failed and which led to extensive scientific exploration and to romantic commercial ventures: the Canadian fur trade, the effort in the 1870's, almost successful, to encircle the globe by telegraph, the building of the Union Pacific, and to the planes flying across the Pole today and to Nautilus and Skate diving under it. The Passage itself as a commercial land and sea route was discovered more or less haphazardly in the last century by men of the Hudson's Bay Company searching for an easy way to transport furs westward and eastward across Canada. To give the full scope and flavor of this wonderful book is impossible; beautifully documented, based on vast personal knowledge and a lifetime of research and study of little-known records, it must stand as the definitive work on its subject. Too long and possibly too specialized for lazy readers, it will appeal to explorers and Arctic adventurers, practising and armchair, to students of navigation and commercial communications, to sailors, historians, and to those who merely enjoy good adventure of all kinds. A must for all public and historical libraries, the name of its author should also insure it a place in lending libraries.

A dissortation devoted to the contention that from the stone age on to the present time, and Stefansson's experiences in the Arctic, man can subsist well on an exclusive diet of meat and fish. Disproving the orthodox beliefs that diet should be varied, should include fruits and vegetables, etc. etc., Stefansson tells of primitive peoples and of his own experiment in 1928 when with another man, under the supervision of Bellevue Hospital, he subsisted for a year on meat and fish only. Last chapters deal with scurvy, with Pemmican, Stefansson's ideal concentrated food, the controversies Pemmican has engendered, etc. A book with a certain dietetic, documentary value, but of no general interest.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to eat an all-meat diet or wants to learn more about the health benefits of a low-carbohydrate diet of meat and fish. Arctic explorer and anthropologist Vilhjálmur Stefánsson spent years living with indigenous Inuit and Eskimo people. He noted their general healthiness (and good teeth), and an absence of many of the diseases that plagued western cultures, such as scurvy, heart disease, and diabetes. Observing their dietary habits, he determined that their primary food was meat, both lean and fatty, and that their diets were very low in sugary or starchy carbohydrates. Was this meaty diet the key to their good health? The book chronicles a 1928 scientific experiment, conducted by the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology at Bellevue Hospital in New York, in which Stefansson and his colleague Dr. Karsten Andersen ate a meat-only diet for one year. The two men stayed healthy and fared very well, leading him to claim that we should reexamine our notion of what foods constitute a healthy diet.

"Between 1906 and 1918, anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson went on three long expeditions to the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic. He wrote voluminously about his travels and observations, as did others. Stefansson's fame was partly fueled by a series of controversies involving envious competitors in the race for public recognition. While many anthropological works refer to his writings, and he continues to be cited in ethnographic and historical works on indigenous peoples of the North American Arctic, particularly the Inuit, his successes in exploration (the discovery and mapping of some of the last remaining uncharted land on earth) have overshadowed his anthropological work. Writing on Ice utilizes his extensive fieldwork diaries, now in Dartmouth College's Special Collections, and contemporary photographs and sketches, some never before published, to bring to life the anthropology of the Arctic explorer. Gisli Palsson situates the diaries in the context of that era's anthropological practice, early 20th-century expeditionary power relations, and the North American community surrounding Stefansson. He also examines the tension between the rhetoric of ethnography and exploration (the notion of the "friendly Arctic") and the reality of fieldwork and exploration, partly with reference to Stefansson's silence about his Inuit family."

Great Adventures and Explorations From Earliest Times to the Present as Told by the Explorers Themselves. There has been no book like this before, because no one with Dr. Stefanson's knowledge of the subject has ever devoted himself to such vast undertaking. Working in close co-operation with Dr. Stefanson, Richard Edes Harrison, the distinguished cartographer, has supplied a multitude of maps and charts whcih further illuminate the enthralling text.