Rating: 
Summary: Authentic & compelling.
Review: As well as Great Heart, I have read both of the source books by Dillon Wallace, the book by Mina Hubbard, as well as the book by Cabot, cited in Great Heart. This is a great bit of sleuthing and research and very well presented. In addition to bringing to life a historic disaster, this book does a great job of posing the question: Why do "explorers" take liberties with the truth in their books, and then why does the press shut their eyes to that and cover up the inconsistencies. Once you read this book, go out and get the source books so you can further explore this for yourself. And then... go out and canoe it! A must read for anyone who likes the Canadian bush.
Rating:
Summary: Bringing to life an old drama in a thorough way
Review: As well as Great Heart, I have read both of the source books by Dillon Wallace, the book by Mina Hubbard, as well as the book by Cabot, cited in Great Heart. This is a great bit of sleuthing and research and very well presented. In addition to bringing to life a historic disaster, this book does a great job of posing the question: Why do "explorers" take liberties with the truth in their books, and then why does the press shut their eyes to that and cover up the inconsistencies. Once you read this book, go out and get the source books so you can further explore this for yourself. And then... go out and canoe it! A must read for anyone who likes the Canadian bush.
Rating: 
Summary: Annoying novelistic style
Review: As you can see from other reviews, most people seem to really like this book. I, however, got a few pages in and found I had no use for it, even though I generally go for just this sort of story. The authors of "Great Heart" use a novelistic narrative style, filling in from their imagination all manner of little details that they obviously could have no way of knowing. I'm apparently enough of a purist that I want my narratives based on reliable source material, not imagination. When an author begins to fictionalize, how can one ever know where the boundary between fact and fiction lies? This doesn't seem to have bothered most of the reviewers, but you might want to stay away from the book if you're similarly picky.
Rating: 
Summary: Re Great Heart--the romance angle
Review: Everything Jim says about Great Heart is true. Unfortunately, like Hubbard and Wallace in their narratives, he leaves out the best stuff. The juice of this story was buried in the original diaries--some of them never opened until we managed to dig them out of long-forgotten trunks and attics. It turns out that Mrs. Hubbard, heading into the back country with four Indians and half-breeds was not immune to the charms of the story's true hero, George Elson, the half-white, half-Cree. who bcame her "Great Heart." For details, don't wait for the movie. Buy this book!
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Excellent read - hard to put it down.
Rating:
Summary: Summer reading at camp
Review: From two of the men who brought us "The Complete Wilderness Paddler" (a marvelous book in itself), this is a must read, preferably while you yourself are tucked comfortably at camp, or in the tent waiting out the storm, or late at night by the oil lamp. You won't miss with this one.
Rating:
Summary: Summer reading at camp
Review: From two of the men who brought us "The Complete Wilderness Paddler" (a marvelous book in itself), this is a must read, preferably while you yourself are tucked comfortably at camp, or in the tent waiting out the storm, or late at night by the oil lamp. You won't miss with this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Disappointing
Review: I personally found the *gritty* style of this book annoying. I knew it was an intimate look at the circumstances surrounding the disasterous Hubbard expedition and the subsequent journey undertaken by his wife Mina, but this account reads more like a 1950s pulp novel or a Louis L'amour western. The prose is choppy and entirely too chatty, sinking at times to a veritable nadir of banality: "George stepped off the Williamstown train, feeling like a fox ready to have his heart pulled." (whatever hell that means), or "...a lot of trappers weren't interested in the idea of foolin' with someone dead" (too folksy). In short it's a slipshod narrative history written in the vein of an adolescent adventure story.
Rating:
Summary: Very Disappointing
Review: I personally found the *gritty* style of this book annoying. I knew it was an intimate look at the circumstances surrounding the disasterous Hubbard expedition and the subsequent journey undertaken by his wife Mina, but this account reads more like a 1950s pulp novel or a Louis L'amour western. The prose is choppy and entirely too chatty, sinking at times to a veritable nadir of banality: "George stepped off the Williamstown train, feeling like a fox ready to have his heart pulled." (whatever hell that means), or "...a lot of trappers weren't interested in the idea of foolin' with someone dead" (too folksy). In short it's a slipshod narrative history written in the vein of an adolescent adventure story.
Rating:
Summary: Why we chased Hubbard across Labrador
Review: John Rugge and I began canoeing the wilderness rivers ofLabrador in the 1970s. Even then, we were familiar with the classicstory of Leonidas Hubbard's death by starvation in 1903. In John's case, he had grown up hearing about the tragedy over the breakfast table from his father, who, in turn, had listened to the story many years earlier from his own dad. In its day, the rivalry grabbed national headlines, especially when Wallace resolved in 1905 to return to Labrador to complete Hubbard's route. To his astonishment and dismay, he found a rival in the field--none other than Hubbard's grieving widow. A young woman of singularly high spirits, Mina Hubbard blamed Wallace for her husband's death and resolved to cross Labrador herself. Yet when John and I tried to track down the roots of this rivalry, we found only silence. Both Wallace and Mina Hubbard wrote books about their trips, but anyone who pulls them off the library shelf will receive not the slightest hint from either that there was another canoeing party within hundreds of miles, much less parties well known to one another. When the two accounts are compared side by side, it becomes obvious that hostility of a rare order must have prevailed between the two parties. But why had Hubbard's expedition generated such controversy? We began hunting up old newspapers, searching for the never-published diaries, and paddling the routes of the original expeditions in Labrador--a country that is still wilderness today. GREAT HEART is the result of our investigations. "Astonishing adventure. . . a narrative that combines the grace of fiction with the power of history. . . . ." --The New York Times Book Review "A first-rate book, one of the best of its kind in many years." --Outside Magazine "A tale that combines scrupulous adherence to the evidence with a cross-cutting narrative Hitchcock would have admired. GREAT HEART is a prose epic of Labrador." --The Washington Post END
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