Fans pick 100 books like Peter Freuchen's Famous Book of the Eskimos

If there’s one name that thrills anyone interested in Antarctic exploration, Shackleton is it.

In 1914, he led a crew of 28 men to Antarctica aboard the sailing ship Endurance, with the goal of crossing the continent by dog sled. The weather was bad, and Endurance was frozen into the icepack. The following summer was cold, and the ice did not melt. It was almost two years on the ice and traversing the sea in small boats before Shackleton was able to bring his crew home. He lost not a single man.

What I found fascinating, besides the physical dangers they survived, was the camaraderie among the men and—hard to believe—some of them even went back on later expeditions.

Never in Anger was a life-changing book for me. It led me to my deep interest in anthropology and, ultimately, to me writing.

Jean Briggs was dropped off in Northern Canada to do her fieldwork for her PhD by studying an Eskimo (now Inuit) family. The bush pilot would be back to pick her up in a year! She wanted to study shamanism, but they refused to talk about what they considered their primitive past, so she studied the children instead.

Some of the book is about language acquisition, I skipped over that part when I reread it. What interests me is how she learned to understand and live in a culture so totally foreign to hers—an amazing journey for her and for me.

Inuit and Danish in heritage, Knud Rasmussen is one of the major stars of Arctic research. He led one of the most famous explorations of northern Canada, The Fifth Thule Expedition, and documented the lives and culture of the people who lived there.

This modern biography doesn’t have the drama and excitement of firsthand accounts, but it’s comprehensive and well-written. It has many interesting details of the lives of both Rasmussen and Peter Freuchen. Additionally, it gives readers a look at the larger context of politics and exploration in the first half of the 20th century.  

This one’s just for fun.

An inuksuk (plural: inuksuit) is a cairn of stones, sometimes small, sometimes huge, sometimes shaped like a human, built by the Inuit (and by you if you want to; the book includes instructions). They have many functions: to mark a meat cache, a good place to haul out your kayak, or a useful pass through mountains; to scare caribou into a hunting area; and even to act as a silent companion for a lonely person.

An inuksuk is the symbol on the flag of Nunavut, the relatively new Inuit territory, established in 1999 in northern Canada. This book, including many photos and drawings, gives the reader a good introduction to the historical and contemporary Inuit. 

I tracked down a 1973 hardback edition of this book because I fell in love with it. The publication date, the year of my birth, was an added bonus. I borrowed Lowenstein’s translation of material collected by Knud Rasmussen, the famous polar explorer, from the library. As soon as I read the preface, I knew I had to own it. It’s an owning kind of book. Inuit poems are raw like the environment they are birthed in – the words and the people. Some might call the poems simplistic, but having lived in the Arctic, I know that even the simplest things can be challenging, and often life-threatening. The poems in this book capture another world that is so very far removed from our own and yet startlingly vibrant and important. 

If you want to understand ice cores, this is your book. As a climate scientist, Alley taught me so much with this expert, clear-eyed but humble overview of ice core collection and analysis. I loved reading about GISP2, one of two Greenland ice cores that brought up rock and soil from below the ice.

I found this book powerful because the author was there when drillers extracted the core–he lived ice coring, and that made this a special read.

Not only is Vaughan’s book full of history and exciting and romantic names, it is the perfect introduction to a fabulous part of the world, and a snapshot of what once was, and what might never be again, as the Arctic is subject to constant change–climatically and politically. This is another well-thumbed book of mine. It is a go-to book for facts and details. It’s not a page-turner, but more of a returner–I imagine many readers, like me, returning to this book with a query to be answered, or a historical itch to be scratched. 

My copy of Génsbøl’s nature guide is well-thumbed. I often used it to find out what I was eating. That’s right; it is a nature guide, packed with fabulous illustrations–better than photographs–that allow for easy identification of the flora and fauna of Greenland, but I also used it to identify what I was eating when invited to an Inuit hunter’s kaffemik–a celebration of culture, tradition, and food wrapped up in a birthday or child’s confirmation party. The guide is an indispensable companion for anyone travelling to the Arctic, and Greenland in particular. But it is equally enjoyable, perhaps even more so, when sitting in a favourite armchair with a favourite beverage in familiar surroundings, dreaming of the far north.

For me, this book was a time machine. Full of photographs and easy-to-follow stories, it took me back to the 1960s, under the ice, and inside Camp Century. I felt like a soldier bunking in the camp, an engineer starting up the reactor, and relived the frustration and loneliness of young men living in a dark, cold place for months on end.

Sure, they had unlimited steak and four meals a day in the mess hall, but they lived without family and fresh food. What a life on and off the ice!

Marie Herbert’s book is exceptional as it documents a period of time in the life of an Arctic explorer’s wife. Marie didn’t stay at home when her husband Wally Herbert travelled to the far north of Greenland to live with the Inuit. She went with him. In addition to the incredible insights Marie records about Inuit life in the harsh Arctic during her time on Herbert Island, The Snow People is a very personal book for me. Marie Herbert wrote the acknowledgments for the book in May 1973. I was born in August of the same year, and thirty-seven years later I would stare at the same island from my kitchen window when I lived in Greenland. A truly magical and, for me, prophetic read.