Book Reviews

“Your book has amazed and gripped me.

Because of its story but also because of its style, without which your story couldn’t have been presented in precisely that gripping way. You manage a “big tent” of style that brings so many different parts within it, dancing them together so that they are no longer distinct parts, but footsteps in one round. I’d expected an historical documentary, and it’s there in the governmental speeches and people’s comments on them. But suddenly there’s a colourful description of surroundings (people like walking chimneys”, of individuals, other their turns of phrase (finding a bean in a black cat’s ass). The style becomes, inseparably, that of a novelist and a great raconteur. I could hear a yearning voice each time I picked your book up.”

Roger Nash, Professor Emeritus, Philosophy Department, Laurentian University

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“I thank you; as a ready who loves a superbly written story.

“I knew the book would be wonderful, knowing as I did about your life in the far north, but it is even more than a wonderful book: there can be no doubt that it will be regarded as a classic in the years ahead, and I don not say that lightly. I was a book reviewer for the Journal Canadian Literature for many years, reviewing forty or so books in my time there, and I hardly ever had occasion to say that a book was certain to become a classic, but I do so without hesitation, when it comes to Umingmak. It documents in ways that no other book does, or could do, and incredibly important chapter in Canadian history, and does so with writing that is impossible to put down. As a Canadian, I thank you; as a ready who loves a superbly written story, I thank you. The importance of your book to our national understanding cannot be overestimated.”

“You gave me such enjoyment with Umingmak: the kind of deep enjoyment that can come only with a book that has important things to say, and that says them superbly. This is a rare book indeed. Umingmak is just such a book. Thank you for writing it.”

Alexander Forbes, former book reviewer for The Journal Canadian Literature, former Professor of English at Thompson Rivers University