What is it about the Far North that not only causes people to risk their lives to explore it but also draws people to read about it? I’m not sure, and neither is Berton, but he sure writes a good book about five people whose lives in some ways were defined and/or determined by the No...
I think sub titles for books like this should “White Men Doing Stupid Things When They Should Have Asked Natives Instead”. Because honestly, it would have been much easier if they had just followed the Inuit. This massive book is about the discovery and exploration of...
My dad used to read this to me on cold winter nights when I was a kid (not this version: he had an old, library-bound copy of The Collected Poems of Robert W. Service), and now my wife, a middle school teacher, reads it to her students every Halloween. Ooh, goosebumps!
Written by Pierre Burton, a Canadian literary and media superstar, and illustrated by his daughter Patsy, this adventure features four siblings searching for their baby brother, The Pollywog as they call him. Burton based the children on his own and it brought him more fan mail than any other of his...
Pierre Berton's virtues are well known - he's accessible; he tells a good story in decent prose. He's a good popularizer. To someone whose profession is in primary historical documents, the lack of notes and sources can be an irritant: there's no indulgence of the "I want to read more" impulse. But ...
When I first came across this book it was because my teacher had chosen it for story time, this of course was over six years ago. The Secret World of Og was the first book I ever really fell in love with, but as all things go I eventually moved on and promptly forgot about Og. Years and years pass a...
I doubt I'll ever be able to forget this poem. My sixth grade reading teacher made the entire class memorize it, and then would call on us in a random order to recite one line at a time. I had to have read the thing a good hundred times, so that I'd never be stuck, no matter where I got called on in...
I have always been fascinated by polar exploration. Fortunately, there has been no dearth of excellent books on the subject, not to mention film documentaries. Dr. Mosher was kind enough to loan me a tape of the British series The Last Place on Earth, which dramatizes Roland Huntford's book about th...
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