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Havoc by Tom Kristensen. Madison. 1968. University of Wisconsin Press. Translated from the Danish by Carl Malmberg. Introduction by Borge Gedso Madsen. 427 pages.

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    That a man should reduce his life to havoc in the hope of finding his soul among the ruins-such seems to be the one course left open to the intellectual Ole Jastrau, living in Denmark in the 1920’s. He experiences the failure of all the nostrums men resorted to in the tormented time between the wars to cure the pervasive malaise of disillusionment. Religion promises him regeneration but offers instead the monotonous logic of a dogmatic theology. The great rebellion of the workers disintegrates into a comic spectacle in the streets of Copenhagen; and tired, disillusioned radicals retreat into their own intellectual circle to talk endlessly around the clichés of a failed ideology. ‘Beware of the soul and cultivate it not,’ runs the motto of this novel, ‘for doing so can be a form of vice.’ For Jastrau only complete chaos, havoc, remains. The progress of his degradation and the sickness of the moral and intellectual milieu that provokes him to such an awesome self-destruction Kristensen records with detail so accurately observed, insight so ironic, and symbolism so powerful as to compel the conclusion that Jastrau’s course through the chaotic 1920’S, if disastrous, was the meaningful response of a sensitive man to a time that was out of joint. Kristensen described in HAVOC a period and a society that he knew intimately. HAVOC is a valuable and significant addition to the literature in English of the period in our history that did much to shape the modern consciousness. But it is more than that. Although the novel is peculiarly a product of Denmark in the twenties, Kristensen’s portrait of the sensitive man’s alienation from his society and his compulsion to create his identity out of the anarchy of his own soul-themes that continue to inform contemporary literature-makes Kristensen the spiritual contemporary not only of Eliot, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, but of Camus, Beckett, and Bellow as well.

Born in 1893, reared in Copenhagen, and awarded the M.A. degree in Danish, English, and German in 1919, Kristensen established himself firmly in the Danish world of letters in the 1920’s with a remarkably versatile offering of poetry, fiction, a travel book on Spain, and critical essays on literature for the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken. In 1930, at the close of that highly productive decade, he published his finest novel, HAVOC, now available for the first time in English. Readers of HAVOC will not be surprised to learn that Tom Kristensen is considered one of Denmark’s most distinguished living writers.

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School of the Sun by Ana Maria Matute. New York. 1963. Pantheon Books. Translated from the Spanish by Elaine Kerrigan. 242 pages.

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    A Spanish writer’s approach by the intimist route to the still unassuaged griefs of the Civil War. What happens is that the protected bourgeois world in which it is possible to go on with the pretext of childishness at fourteen is split open by the realities of war, or, rather, the realities of which the war is the expression.

Ana María Matute Ana María Matute Ausejo (26 July 1925 – 25 June 2014) was the most prominent woman writer of 20th century Spain. Her novels and short stories have won many prestigious literary awards including the Premio Nacional de Literatura, Premio Nadal, Premio de la Crítica and Premio Café de Gijón. She was the third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize for her literary oeuvre. She is considered to be one of the foremost novelists of the posguerra, the period immediately following the Spanish Civil War. She studied at the international school of Hilversum in the Netherlands. She has been a guest lecturer to the universities of Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia. Matute was born on 26 July 1925. At the age of four she almost died from a chronic kidney infection, and was taken to live with her grandparents in Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, for a period of recovery. Matute says that she was profoundly influenced by the villagers whom she met during her time there. This influence can be seen in such works as those published in the 1961 anthology Historias de la Artamila (‘Stories about the Artamila’, all of which deal with the people that Matute met during her recovery). Settings reminiscent of that town are also often used as settings for her other work. Matute was ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only ‘the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each one’. The war resulted in Francisco Franco's rise to power, starting in 1936 and escalating until 1939, when he took control of the entire country. Franco established a dictatorship which lasted thirty-six years, until his death in 1975. The violence brought on by the war continued through much of his reign. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under Franco's oppressive regime, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence. Her work was sometimes censored by the Franco regime, and at least once she was fined because of her writings. She published her first story, ‘The Boy Next Door,’ when she was only 17 years old. Matute was known for her sympathetic treatment of the lives of children and adolescents, their feelings of betrayal and isolation, and their rites of passage. She often interjected such elements as myth, fairy tale, the supernatural, and fantasy into her works. Matute was a university professor. She traveled to various countries, especially the United States, as a lecturer. She was outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost. She was an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America and a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She won the Spanish literary award, the Premio Nadal, in 1958 for the first novel of the trilogy, ‘Los Mercaderes’. On 25 June 2014, Matute died of a heart attack at the age of 88.

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The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. Manchester. 1986. Carcanet. Translated From The Portuguese By Giovanni Pontiero. 96 pages. Cover: Michael Helme. 0856356263.

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   Clarice Lispector said that THE HOUR OF THE STAR was made without Words. a mute photograph. a silence. a question. ’ Macabea comes to Rio from the backwoods of Brazil, poor in all but illusion. The story of her brief life is told by Rodriqo S. M. , a cosmopolitan character, remote from her except in one respect: he is looking for an identity. In telling her story he recoils time after time: the hypnotic tension of THE HOUR OF THE STAR, Clarice Lispector’s masterpiece, is in his pained relationship with Macabea. Macabea finds a room in the slums. A bad typist, a virgin, her favourite drink is Coca-Cola. Incompetent and inexperienced, she loves Hollywood films and looks hungrily in the mirror for proof that she, too. has a future. She is a foil for her bullying employer, her philandering boy-friend, and her workmate Gloria, who has all the attributes of body and spirit which Macabea lacks. Macabea doesn’t go to pieces: she is simply emptied by her experience, ignorance and isolation. Yet she believes that glamour and a square meal await her somewhere: she is credulous, too, so that a fortune-teller, mistelling her future, provides her with a brief, ecstatic moment of transformation. The narrator peels back the prejudices of one class, one sex, about another, until in the end he stands naked before the mortality of the character he has created. 

CLARICE LISPECTOR, one of the most significant writers in twentieth-century Brazilian literature, died in 1977. Her works range from literary essays to novelistic fiction and children’s literature. Lispector is best known in Latin America and Europe; only recently have some of her works been translated from Portuguese into English. Other English translations include FAMILY TIES, THE APPLE IN THE DARK and THE HOUR OF THE STAR.

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Howes, Barbara (editor). Eye of the Heart: Short Stories From Latin America. Indianapolis. 1973. Bobbs-Merrill. 0672516373. 415 pages. hardcover.

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Here in a single volume are forty-two short stories from the finest writers in Latin American literature. The contributors include not only highly respected names (Neruda, Borges, Cortazar, Mistral, Fuentes, Asturias, Amado, Paz) but also the most controversial and experimental storytellers, some of whom have emerged only in the last few years (Donoso, de Assis, Novas-Calvo, Bosch, Reyes, and dozens more). The Minneapolis Tribune describes THE EYE OF THE HEART as ‘a substantial sampling . . . gifts of truth. Their authors saw with the heart.’ And Jorge Luis Borges calls this book ‘quite impressive. All of the important writers are there and the stories are all good . . . I know nothing like it now.’ 

Barbara Howes (May 1, 1914 New York City - February 24, 1996 Bennington, Vermont) was an American poet. She was adopted by well-to-do Massachusetts family, and reared chiefly in Chestnut Hill, where she attended Beaver Country Day School. She graduated from Bennington College in 1937. She worked briefly for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Mississippi, and then edited the literary magazine, Chimera, from 1943 to 1947 and lived in Greenwich Village. In 1947 she married the poet William Jay Smith, and they lived for a time in England and Italy. They had two sons, David Smith, and Gregory. They divorced in the mid-1960s, and she lived in Pownal, Vermont. In 1971, she signed a letter protesting proposed cuts to the School of the Arts, Columbia University. Her work was published in, Atlantic, Chicago Review, New Directions, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Southern Review, University of Kansas Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Yale Review.

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Life And Fate by Vasily Grossman. New York. 1986. Harper & Row. 880 pages. March 1986. hardcover. 0060153652. Jacket illustration by Christopher Zacharow. Translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler. 

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   Suppressed by the KGB, Life and Fate is a rich and vivid account of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union. On its completion in 1960, LIFE AND FATE was suppressed by the KGB. Twenty years later, the novel was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm. At the centre of this epic novel looms the battle of Stalingrad. Within a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war, Grossman’s characters must work out their destinies. Chief among these are the members of the Shaposhnikov family – Lyudmila, a mother destroyed by grief for her dead son; Viktor, her scientist-husband who falls victim to anti-semitism; and Yevgenia, forced to choose between her love for the courageous tank-commander Novikov and her duty to her former husband. Life and Fate is one of the great Russian novels of the 20th century, and the richest and most vivid account there is of what the Second World War meant to the Soviet Union.

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman (December 12, 1905 - September 14, 1964) was a Soviet writer and journalist. Grossman trained as an engineer and worked in the Donets Basin, but changed career in the 1930s and published short stories and several novels. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he became a war correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, writing firsthand accounts of the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. Grossman's eyewitness accounts of conditions in a Nazi extermination camp, following the liberation of Treblinka, were among the earliest. Grossman also translated Armenian literature into Russian, despite the fact that (as he writes in 'Dobro Vam!', - the account of a sojourn in Armenia in the early 1960s, during which he worked at the translation of a book by a local writer called Martirosjan) he lacked the ability to read Armenian, and worked on an interlinear translation made for him by a third person. After World War II, Grossman's faith in the Soviet state was shaken by Joseph Stalin's turn towards antisemitism in the final years before his death in 1953. While Grossman was never arrested by the Soviet authorities, his two major literary works (Life and Fate and Everything Flows) were censored during the ensuing Nikita Khrushchev period as unacceptably anti-Soviet, and Grossman himself became in effect a nonperson. The KGB raided Grossman's flat after he had completed Life and Fate, seizing manuscripts, notes and even the ribbon from the typewriter on which the text had been written. Grossman was told by the Communist Party's chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov that the book could not be published for two or three hundred years. At the time of Grossman's death from stomach cancer in 1964, these books were unreleased. Copies were eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a network of dissidents, including Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich, and first published in the West, before appearing in the Soviet Union in 1988. Born Iosif Solomonovich Grossman in Berdychiv, Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) into an emancipated Jewish family, he did not receive a traditional Jewish education. A Russian nanny turned his name Yossya into Russian Vasya (a diminutive of Vasily), which was accepted by the whole family. His father had social-democratic convictions and joined the Mensheviks. Young Vasily Grossman idealistically supported the Russian Revolution of 1917. Grossman began writing short stories while studying at Moscow State University and later continued his literary activity working as an engineer in the Donbass. One of his first short stories, In the town of Berdichev, drew favourable attention and encouragement from Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Bulgakov. The film Commissar (director Aleksandr Askoldov), made in 1967, suppressed by the KGB and released only in October 1990, is based on this four-page story. In the mid-1930s Grossman left his job as an engineer and committed himself fully to writing. By 1936 he had published two collections of stories and the novel Glyukauf, and in 1937 was accepted into the privileged Union of Writers. His novel Stepan Kol'chugin (published 1937-40) was nominated for a Stalin prize but deleted from the list by Stalin himself for alleged Menshevik sympathies. During the Great Purge some of his friends and close relatives were arrested, including his common-law wife. For months he petitioned the authorities to release her, which happened in 1938. When Nazi-Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Grossman's mother was trapped in Berdychiv by the invading German Army, and eventually murdered together with 20,000 to 30,000 other Jews who had not evacuated. Grossman was exempt from military service, but volunteered for the front, where he spent more than 1,000 days. He became a war correspondent for the popular Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star). As the war raged on, he covered its major events, including the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk and the Battle of Berlin. In addition to war journalism, his novels (such as The People are Immortal) were being published in newspapers and he came to be regarded as a legendary war hero. The novel Stalingrad (1950), later renamed For a Just Cause, is based on his own experiences during the siege. Grossman described Nazi ethnic cleansing in German occupied Ukraine and Poland, and the liberation by the Red Army of the Nazi-German Treblinka and Majdanek extermination camps. He collected some of the first eyewitness accounts - as early as 1943 - of what later became known as the Holocaust. His article The Hell of Treblinka (1944) was disseminated at the Nuremberg Trials as evidence for the prosecution. Grossman participated in the assembly of the Black Book, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the crimes of the Holocaust. The post-war suppression of the Black Book by the Soviet state shook him to the core, and he began to question his own loyal support of the Soviet regime. First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked with the Nazis as police. Then, in 1948, the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. The poet Semyon Lipkin, Grossman's friend, believed it was Joseph Stalin's post-war antisemitic campaign that cracked Grossman's belief in the Soviet system. Grossman also criticized collectivization and political repression of peasants that led to the Holodomor tragedy. He wrote that ‘The decree about grain procurement required that the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children.’ Because of state persecution, only a few of Grossman's post-war works were published during his lifetime. After he submitted for publication his magnum opus, the novel Life and Fate (1959), the KGB raided his flat. The manuscripts, carbon copies, notebooks, as well as the typists' copies and even the typewriter ribbons were seized. The Politburo ideology chief Mikhail Suslov told Grossman that his book could not be published for two or three hundred years. Grossman wrote to Nikita Khrushchev: ‘What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested... I am not renouncing it... I am requesting freedom for my book.’ However, Life and Fate and his last major novel, Everything Flows (1961) were considered a threat to the Soviet power; these novels were suppressed and the dissident writer effectively transformed into a nonperson. Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964, not knowing whether his major novels would ever be read by the public. Life and Fate was published in 1980 in Switzerland, thanks to fellow dissidents: physicist Andrei Sakharov secretly photographed draft pages preserved by Semyon Lipkin, and the writer Vladimir Voinovich managed to smuggle the photographic films abroad. Two dissident researchers, professors and writers, Efim Etkind and Shimon Markish retyped the text from the microfilm, with some mistakes and misreadings due to the bad quality. The book was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1988 after the policy of glasnost was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. The text was published again in 1989, because further original manuscripts emerged after the first publication. Everything Flows was also published in the Soviet Union in 1989. Life and Fate is considered to be in part an autobiographical work. Robert Chandler, the novel's English translator, has written in his introduction to the Harvill edition that its leading character, Viktor Shtrum, ‘is a portrait of the author himself,’ reflecting in particular his anguish at the murder of his mother at the Berdichev Ghetto. Chapter 18, a letter from Shtrum's mother, Anna, has been dramatized for the stage and film The Last Letter (2002), directed by Frederick Wiseman, and starring Catherine Samie. Chandler additionally suggests that aspects of the character and experience of Shtrum are based on the physicist Lev Landau. The late novel Everything Flows, in turn, is especially noted for its quiet, unforced, and yet horrifying condemnation of the Soviet totalitarian state: a work in which Grossman, liberated from worries about censors, spoke honestly about Soviet history. Some critics have compared Grossman's novels to the work of Leo Tolstoy.

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The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890 by Leonard Pitt. Berkeley. 1998. University of California Press. paperback. 324 pages. Foreword by Ramón A. Gutiérrez. 0520219589.

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   In his enduring study of Spanish-speaking Californians—a group that includes both native-born Californians, or Californios, and immigrants from Mexico—Leonard Pitt charts one of the earliest chapters in the state's ethnic history, and, in the process, he sheds light on debates and tensions that continue to this day. In a new foreword for this edition, Ramón A. Gutiérrez discusses the shaping and reception of the book and also views this classic work in light of recent scholarship on California and ethnic history.

Leonard Pitt is Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Northridge. He is the coauthor, with Dale Pitt, of Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia (1997). Ramón A. Gutiérrez is Associate Chancellor and Professor of Ethnic Studies and History at the University of California, San Diego, and is coeditor of Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush (California, 1998). 

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Legends Of The Fall by Jim Harrison. New York. 1978. Delacorte Press. hardcover. 0440054656.

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   Includes ‘Legends of the Fall,’ ‘Revenge,’ and ‘The Man who Gave Up His Name.’ All three volumes issued in cream colored linen housed in a cream colored slipcase. The publication of this magnificent trilogy of short novels confirmed Jim Harrison s reputation as one of the finest American writers of his generation. These absorbing novellas explore the theme of revenge and survival, adding up to an extraordinary vision of the twentieth-century man. Set in the Rocky Mountains, Legends of the Fall is the epic tale of three brothers and their lives at the beginning of World War I. In Revenge, love causes the course of a man s life to be savagely and irrevocably altered. And in The Man Who Gave Up His Name, a man is unable to relinquish his consuming obsessions with women, dancing, and food. 

James Harrison (December 11, 1937 – March 26, 2016) was an American writer known for his poetry, fiction, reviews, essays about the outdoors, and writings about food. He is best known for his 1979 novella "Legends of the Fall". He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and to have retained some qualities of their agrarian pioneer heritage which explains their sense of rugged intelligence and common sense. They attune themselves to both the natural and the civilized world, surrounded by excesses, but determined to live their lives as well as possible.

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Last of the Conquerors by William Gardner Smith. New York. 1948. Farrar Straus & Company. hardcover. 262 pages. August 1948. 

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   ‘William Gardner Smith has the two great qualities, simplicity and bitternes. One is a divine gift, and the other, a tragic acquisition.’ - Christopher Morley. Some people will read this novel with indignation, some with shame. Many will be shocked. It is the story of a young man who learned for the first time - in an enemy country - how it feels to be treated as a human being. It is the story of Hayes Dawkins, Negro soldier in the Army of Occupation, who found himself accepted as an equal by the Germans and looked upon as an inferior by his white comrades in arms. In Berlin Hayes discovered a new world in which he could go where he pleased, face any man, love any woman. When a change of station brought him to a post where he was again a Negro, a second-class human being, the shock and hurt were almost too great to bear. It was then he knew why Negroes would rather stay in Germany than go home, why some even deserted to the Russian zone. Caught in a current of injustice and hatred, Hayes was faced with an almost impossible decision - a choice between two worlds. In portraying Hayes Dawkins, William Gardner Smith has drawn a moving picture of a young man caught between two worlds unable to decide which he should make his own. LAST OF THE CONQUERORS is a first novel of promise and distinction. Born in 1927, William Gardner Smith was only twenty when he finished LAST OF THE CONQUERORS, his first novel. Born and brought up in Philadelphia, he has been a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier in that city for five years. After spending a year in Germany in the Army of Occupation, he attended Temple University.

William Gardner Smith (February 6, 1927 – November 5, 1974) was an American journalist, novelist, and editor. Smith is linked to the black social protest novel tradition of the 1940s and the 1950s, a movement that became synonymous with writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Willard Motley, and Ann Petry. His third book, South Street (1954), is considered to be one of the first black militant protest novels. Smith's last published novel, The Stone Face (1963), in its account of the Paris massacre of 1961, ‘stand[s] as one of the few representations of the event available’. Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania of African American descent. After 1951, he maintained an expatriate status in France. However, due to his various journalistic and editorial assignments, he also lived for extended periods of time in Ghana. In the final decade of his life, Smith would travel to the United States to visit family and friends and write about the racial and social upheaval that was occurring there. Some of Smith's journalism and reportage from this period was published in various media outlets in France and Europe. Some of it was revised, re-adapted, and published in Return To Black America in 1970. Smith spoke fluent French, and was a frequent contributor and guest on radio and television programs in France where he was considered an expert on the political struggle, civil unrest, and racial tension occurring in the United States during the turbulent decade of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Smith was diagnosed with cancer in October 1973 and died just over a year later in Thiais, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France.

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Haiti Noir by Edwidge Danticat (editor). New York. 2011. Akashic Books. hardcover. 315 pages. 9781617750137.

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   'A wide-ranging collection from the beloved but besieged Caribbean island. [. ] The 36th entry in Akashic's Noir series (which ranges from Bronx to Delhi to Twin Cities) is beautifully edited, with a spectrum of voices.' --Kirkus Reviews. 'Danticat has succeeded in assembling a group portrait of Haitian culture and resilience that is cause for celebration.' --Publishers Weekly. 'A solid contribution to the [noir] series, especially for its showcasing of a setting not commonly portrayed in crime fiction.' --Booklist. 'Who can ever judge how important Danticat has been to Americans' understanding and re-evaluating Haiti's position and role in the hemisphere? Not just as a novelist and essayist in her own right, but as editor and guiding force behind this collection of short stories and the re-publication and English translation of the Chauvet triptych, the Haitian-born Danticat has brought her country's literature back into the world of English-speakers. Filled with delights and surprises, Haiti Noir, taken as a whole, provides a profound portrait of the country, from its crises to its triumphs, from the tiny bouks of the countryside to the shanties of the sprawling bidonvilles. Danticat herself has a lovely story in the collection, and permits two distinguished foreign writers on Haiti, Madison Smartt Bell and Mark Kurlansky, to slide in there among all the brilliant Haitians.' --Daily Beast. Includes brand-new stories by: Edwidge Danticat, Rodney Saint-Eloi, Madison Smartt Bell, Gary Victor, M.J. Fièvre, Marvin Victor, Yanick Lahens, Louis-Philipe Dalembert, Kettly Mars, Marie Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, Evelyne Trouillot, Katia Ulysse, Ibi Aanu Zoboi, Nadine Pinede, and others. Haiti has a tragic history and continues to be one of the most destitute places on the planet, especially in the aftermath of the earthquake. Here, however, Edwidge Danticat reveals that even while the subject matter remains dark, the caliber of Haitian writing is of the highest order.

 Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

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The Last Kings Of Thule by Jean Malaurie. New York. 1982. Dutton. hardcover. 608 pages. Jacket design by Mary Gale Moyes. 0525030522.

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    In 1950, fate beckoned Jean Malaurie. A young scientist studying in the Sahara Desert, he was granted permission to conduct an expedition in the ‘cold desert’ around the North Pole. There he would be living among the northernmost people of the world, the Polar Eskimos of Thule, Greenland. The men of Thule were a race apart. Through geographical isolation and the social planning of Greenlandic Eskimo explorer Knud Rasmussen, they had managed for decades to maintain an advanced, self-sufficient Inuit culture independent of their colonial masters, the Danes. They were truly kings: strong individualists, heroic hunters. Yet they continued to maintain a form of pure communalism, sharing food, property, labor - even offspring and sexual mates. Thievery was practically unknown among them. In all of Greenland there was no jail. This is the society into which Jean Malaurie was granted intimate entry for one historic year. His experience was the last of a kind, for at the end of that year the U.S. government built a huge military base in the middle of Thule Eskimo territory. The isolation was over: the modern world bad won. Rarely has a book come to the English-speaking public with such advance status: translated into sixteen languages. with encomiums from adventurers, naturalists, and scholars alike, with worldwide sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Some readers have hailed the anecdotal side of Eskimo life depicted here; others the harrowing adventures such as the crossing to Canada by dogsled; still others the profound understanding of the Inuit character or the stirring account of Eskimo regeneration in the seventies and eighties. Like the great Eskimo adventure books from decades past - by Elisha Kent Kane, Frederick Cook. Robert Peary - The Last Kings of Thule continues the saga of man’s triumph in the Arctic. More than those works, it paints for us the exemplary life of the Polar Eskimos as they were - and arc becoming again. Jean Malaurie’s portrait is not only a lesson and inspiration for the 100,000 Eskimos in the United States. Canada, Greenland, and the U.S.S.R., but a human model for all mankind.
 

JEAN MALAURIE was trained as a geomorphologist, but after his experience with the Polar Eskimos he turned to authorship, publishing, research, and exploration. In 1967 he recorded on film the disintegrating culture of Thule, and from l974 to 1977 he produced a multipart film documentary on all of the world’s Eskimos, which included footage from Siberia, where Westerners had long been forbidden. He is director of the French Center for Arctic Studies and founder of the publishing imprint Terre Humaine, whose authors include Margaret Mead and Claude Levi-Strauss. He has received awards from many nations, including the Award of the Academie Francaise and of the French Academy of Sciences, and is a consultant to the Greenlandic, French, Canadian, and U.S. governments on Eskimo matters. The Last Kings of Thule is his magnum opus, a chronicle of a life spent as an Eskimo observer, folklorist, and champion of Eskimo rights.