High Latitudes

Farley Mowat has the Arctic in his blood, a map of every corner of the Far North in his mind. It took hard work, endless travel, and countless conversations to acquire such knowledge, and his education forms the heart of his lively, welcome memoir, High Latitudes. In the mid-1960s, acting on a publisher's suggestion, Mowat undertook an odyssey that, he writes, "was to take me through much of the enormous and mysterious realm lying north of the sixtieth parallel of latitude"--a region scarcely known to most of his compatriots, embracing the huge inland body of water that Mowat refers to here as the Canadian Sea and taking in all of the Canadian Arctic. As he travelled, crossing open water and great boreal forests, Mowat talked with everyone he met, from Native people who taught him techniques for survival and joked that the government relied on them "to sustain the employment of scores of white administrators, teachers, scientists, technicians, policemen, social workers, and the like" to entrepreneurs in whose eyes the region promised fortune no matter what the cost to the land. In reporting those travels and conversations, Mowat is at once fierce and affectionate. This is essential reading for those who would take up the Arctic's cause as their own, and a pleasure for Mowat's many admirers. --Gregory McNamee

Author: Farley Mowat

Publisher: Key Porter Books

Year: 2002