Tundra: Selections from the Great Accounts of Arctic Land Voyages: with illustrations and maps - Hardcover

Mowat, Farley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771066279 ISBN 13: 9780771066276

Publisher: McClelland and Stewart, 1973

Synopsis

Book by Mowat, Farley

About this title

About the Author

Farley Mowat was born in Belleville, Ontario, in 1921, and grew up in Belleville, Trenton, Windsor, Saskatoon, Toronto, and Richmond Hill. He served in World War II from 1940 until 1945, entering the army as a private and emerging with the rank of captain. He began writing for his living in 1949 after spending two years in the Arctic. Since 1949 he has lived in or visited almost every part of Canada and many other lands, including the distant regions of Siberia. He remains an inveterate traveller with a passion for remote places and peoples. He has twenty-five books to his name, which have been published in translations in over twenty languages in more than sixty countries. They include such internationally known works as People of the Deer, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, Never Cry Wolf, Westviking, The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, Sibir, A Whale for the Killing, The Snow Walker, And No Birds Sang, and Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey. His short stories and articles have appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Maclean’s, Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.
From the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Mowat's ( Never Cry Wolf ) third volume in his Top of the World trilogy on arctic exploration presents 10 selections from journals of extraordinary men who scoured the Canadian tundra. Neatly editing for a popular audience, Mowat amplifies the texts with minimal intrusion. In the earliest account here (1769-1772), Samuel Hearne describes an almost 5000-mile trek, and trains his eye on the Indians who accompany him--their cookery and customs, including a self-preservation tactic where a sick squaw is left behind to fend for herself, and their bloody ambush of the slumbering Eskimo foe. Later that century, Alexander Mackenzie fails to find a route to the Pacific Ocean but discovers the major river now bearing his name. During WW I, Mounties search the tundra, investigating the disappearance of two Belgian missionaries. In the 1920s, Edgar Christian, fresh from English public school, intends to spend a winter on the plains with his eccentric cousin, trapper John Hornby. Christian's journal relates desolation, cold and an excruciatingly slow death by starvation that claims the entire party. Illustrated.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: McClelland and Stewart
• Publication date: 1973
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0771066279
• ISBN 13: 9780771066276
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416