Here are 100 books that White Eskimo fans have personally recommended if you like
White Eskimo.
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As a teenager, I started reading about people who lived in marginal places, such as the Eskimos of the far north and the Kung San of South Africa. Living a middle-class American life it was difficult for me to understand how people could not only live in those places but also love them. After I raised my children, my husband encouraged me to return to college, and I did, majoring in anthropology. I learned about the deep connections that bind all people—love of home and family. By learning about other people’s lives, much of what confused me about my own fell away.
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.
This book is considered one of the great books of exploration, about what Shackleton himself called "the last great journey on earth". The book tells of the author's Antarctic expedition in which the Endurance was crushed by the ice, and he and his men made a 600-mile trek across ice and ocean to solid land, and then a 700-mile journey in an open boat to South Georgia, followed by an epic crossing of the uncharted mountains of that island. In this edition the text is illustrated with reproductions of the photographs of Frank Hurley - who accompanied the expedition -…
As a teenager, I started reading about people who lived in marginal places, such as the Eskimos of the far north and the Kung San of South Africa. Living a middle-class American life it was difficult for me to understand how people could not only live in those places but also love them. After I raised my children, my husband encouraged me to return to college, and I did, majoring in anthropology. I learned about the deep connections that bind all people—love of home and family. By learning about other people’s lives, much of what confused me about my own fell away.
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.
In the summer of 1963, anthropologist Jean Briggs journeyed to the Canadian Northwest Territories (now Nunavut) to begin a seventeen-month field study of the Utku, a small group of Inuit First Nations people who live at the mouth of the Back River, northwest of Hudson Bay. Living with a family as their "adopted" daughter-sharing their iglu during the winter and pitching her tent next to theirs in the summer-Briggs observed the emotional patterns of the Utku in the context of their daily life.
In this perceptive and highly enjoyable volume the author presents a behavioral description of the Utku through…
As a teenager, I started reading about people who lived in marginal places, such as the Eskimos of the far north and the Kung San of South Africa. Living a middle-class American life it was difficult for me to understand how people could not only live in those places but also love them. After I raised my children, my husband encouraged me to return to college, and I did, majoring in anthropology. I learned about the deep connections that bind all people—love of home and family. By learning about other people’s lives, much of what confused me about my own fell away.
Peter Freuchen, a Danish explorer, first came to Greenland in 1906 and immediately fell in love with the land and its people. He spent the better part of the next 50 years there. He was a partner in adventure with the famous explorer of the north, Knud Rasmussen. Freuchen wrote many books, some of which have been translated into English, including novels.
I chose this one to recommend because it seemed a good place to start, but I love them all. Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos, a summation of much of what he learned over the years,was edited by his second wife, Dagmar, and published three years after he died in 1957.
As a teenager, I started reading about people who lived in marginal places, such as the Eskimos of the far north and the Kung San of South Africa. Living a middle-class American life it was difficult for me to understand how people could not only live in those places but also love them. After I raised my children, my husband encouraged me to return to college, and I did, majoring in anthropology. I learned about the deep connections that bind all people—love of home and family. By learning about other people’s lives, much of what confused me about my own fell away.
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.
An introduction to the many forms of the inuksuk structure
The image of a traditional Inuit stone structure, or inuksuk, silouetted against an arctic sky, has become a familiar symbol. Yet, for many, their purpose remains a mystery. In a stunning new book, artist and children's author Mary Wallace, in consultation with Inuit elders and other noted experts, gives a fascinating introduction in words, pictures, and paintings to the many forms of the inuksuk structure and its unique place in Inuit life and culture.
I love the cold and snow, so it’s no surprise that I ended up studying glaciers and ice sheets. I am also a big fan of history and a professor of Environmental Science who teaches climate and climate change to 200+ college students a year. I grew up reading nonfiction, and nothing changed–that’s my genre. Reading about history and how others have experienced our planet, especially far away and unusual places, intrigues me. My passion is communicating science by writing, speaking, and teaching, and these five books I’ve recommended all do an excellent job of making the science and history of Greenland accessible to everyone.
This book had me shivering. Every chapter introduced another character and another set of often frightening but exhilarating arctic adventures spanning more than 100 years.
I found myself imagining what it must have felt like to cross Greenland’s ice on foot or to have spent the winter living in a rat warren of snow caves at the summit of the ice sheet with the Wegner expedition over the winter of 1930-1931.
An excellent read with well-referenced details and history galore. I couldn’t put it down and read the whole book in two nights.
A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change
“Jon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The Christian Science Monitor • Library Journal
Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it is…
I did not set out to write six books about Arctic exploration. By the mid-1990s, while working full-time as a journalist, I had published three novels. I proposed to become a celebrated novelist. But then, during a three-month stint at the University of Cambridge, I discovered Arctic explorer John Rae–and that he had been denied his rightful recognition by Charles Dickens and other leading Victorians. I researched Rae’s story, marked his greatness in the Arctic, and celebrated him in Fatal Passage. It took me two decades and five more Arctic books to solve the great mystery while also publishing ten books on other subjects. Call me a compulsive scribbler.
First published in 1991, this book draws on Inuit oral history to challenge the “standard reconstruction” of how the Franklin expedition played out, presenting a more complex narrative. A master mariner, Woodman not only repeatedly searched King William Island for relics and bones but was the first to do an in-depth analysis of the unpublished Inuit testimony gathered by Charles Francis Hall with the help of Tookoolito.
Woodman deduced that after the abandonment, some of Franklin’s men returned to the ice-locked vessels. Intensely focused and detailed, this book speaks to aspiring experts–and, for me, drew attention to the need for a broad, accessible survey of Arctic exploration highlighting the Indigenous contribution.
David Woodman's classic reconstruction of the mysterious events surrounding the tragic Franklin expedition has taken on new importance in light of the recent discovery of the HMS Erebus wreck, the ship Sir John Franklin sailed on during his doomed 1845 quest to find the Northwest Passage to Asia. First published in 1991, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery boldly challenged standard interpretations and offered a new and compelling alternative. Among the many who have tried to discover the truth behind the Franklin disaster, Woodman was the first to recognize the profound importance of Inuit oral testimony and to analyze it in depth.…
Why I chose to write about cold climates: I spent nearly seven years living in the North of Norway in the Sámi reindeer herding village called Guovdageaidnu, or Kautokeino in Norwegian. I cherish my time in that part of the world.
I had never been to Greenland when I first read Gretal Erlich’s book, and I knew very little about this mysterious continent. What I loved most about Erlich’s writing is that she really takes readers on a journey, introducing us to the people she meets in her travels, which are as fascinating as her singular way of describing the landscape, which is like no other place on earth.
Many years later, I travelled to Greenland and appreciated the accuracy of her descriptions firsthand.
For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In This Cold Heaven she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine.
Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words…
In 2009, when I decided to set a crime series in Iceland, I embarked on a decade of research into the country, its people, its literature, its culture, and its elves. I visited the country, I spoke to its inhabitants and I read books, lots of books – I couldn’t find an elf, but I was told where they live. I needed to understand its criminals, its victims, its police, and most of all my detective Magnus Jonson. These are the best books that helped me get to grips with Iceland.
I love the sagas. They are stories first told a thousand years ago about the Norse settlers in Iceland. They are crisp, subtle, exciting with some excellent characters, especially the women. My favourites are the two Vinland Sagas, which describe the discovery of Greenland and then North America (Vinland) by Erik the Red and his family. This includes the wonderful Gudrid, who was born in Iceland, got married in Greenland, gave birth to a child called Snorri in Vinland, and then went on a pilgrimage to Rome. All in about 1000 AD!
The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga contain the first ever descriptions of North America, a bountiful land of grapes and vines, discovered by Vikings five centuries before Christopher Columbus. Written down in the early thirteenth century, they recount the Icelandic settlement of Greenland by Eirik the Red, the chance discovery by seafaring adventurers of a mysterious new land, and Eirik's son Leif the Lucky's perilous voyages to explore it. Wrecked by storms, stricken by disease and plagued by navigational mishaps, some survived the North Atlantic to pass down this compelling tale of the first Europeans to…
I am an anthropologist and professor at Cornell University, where I taught 20-year-olds for thirty years. It was my job to explore the world, learn about it, and then educate others, underscoring the notion that all peoples and cultures are equally interesting and valuable. I started out, as a graduate student, watching macaque monkeys for my research, testing if their behavior might give us clues to the evolution of human behavior. But then I switched to science journalism for the popular audience and have, for decades, written for magazines, newspapers, and many books about the intersection of biology and culture on human thought and behavior.
Di Robilant again, of course. This book follows the trail of the story, apocryphal or not, made up or true, of the two Venetian Zen brothers who supposedly sailed to the North Sea in the 14th century. I loved this book because it is like a mystery story, full of questions with no real answers, and yet, in the end, I was convinced by Di Robilant’s investigation that Zens did indeed make it to Greenland and places North in the 1300s.
I really love a nonfiction book by an author who takes a sort of obscure topic and drills down to find the truth. The combination of geography, cartography, Venetian life, and mystery is indeed “irresistible.”
A century before Columbus arrived in America, two brothers from Venice are said to have explored parts of the New World. They became legends during the Renaissance, and then the source of a great scandal that would discredit their story. Today, they have been largely forgotten.
In this very original work—part history, part travelogue—Andrea di Robilant chronicles his discovery of a travel narrative published in 1558 by the Venetian statesman Nicolò Zen. The text and its fascinating nautical map re-created the travels of two of the author’s ancestors, brothers who claimed to have explored the North Atlantic in the 1380s…
I am a writer of historical fiction. When I was in my teens, my family embarked on a project to trace our ancestry and identify our living relatives. Through church records in Sweden and Norway, we found that Harald Fairhair (Harfagr), the first king of Norway is one of our ancestors. Those explorations gave me the seeds of my first novel of Viking-Age Norway, The Half-Drowned King, and the subsequent books in the trilogy.
One of the best ways to envision a historical period is to see its artifacts. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga is a companion to a Smithsonian exhibit of the same name and contains a rich trove of images and descriptions of viking physical culture, along with essays about the archeology of their discovery, and how they were used in the exploration of the North Atlantic, and the eventual journey to the New World.
Replete with color photographs, drawings, and maps of Viking sites, artifacts, and landscapes, this book celebrates and explores the Viking saga from the combined perspectives of history, archaeology, oral tradition, literature, and natural science. The book's contributors chart the spread of marauders and traders in Europe as well as the expansion of farmers and explorers throughout the North Atlantic and into the New World. They show that Norse contacts with Native American groups were more extensive than has previously been believed, but that the outnumbered Europeans never established more than temporary settlements in North America.
