Rating: 
Summary: A privileged glimpse of Eskimo life
Review: Gontran de Poncins's "Kabloona" is a classic of Arctic adventure, to be ranked alongside Farley Mowat's "People of the Deer," Harold Horwood's "White Eskimo" and parts of Peter Freuchen's "Vagrant Viking." A French aristocrat with a genuine yearning for adventure, de Poncins made his way to North America just prior to the last war. By stages, he managed to go right up into latter day Nunavut, some of the highest inhabited Arctic territory in Canada's north. Yet he didn't stop there. Putting himself into the hands of an Eskimo hunter who happened to be heading off onto the sea ice, he underwent an extraordinary odyssey lasting the winter through, in which he camped with the Eskimos in their winter igloos. de Poncins takes us into the very private, very communal world of these northern people. Private because, for Europeans, entering this strangely illuminated landscape was even then almost an impossibility. de Poncins admits that his initial impression was overshadowed by the nausea which sprang immediately into being as he tried to deal with the strange mixture of smells in the igloos. Most Europeans would not pass that first test and many an estimate of Eskimo culture has been biased by just such an affront to a sensitive olfactory centre. Yet once he had passed this initial barrier, a process which he says took some time, he found himself in a world unlike any other he had experienced or imagined. It is into this ageless community that he takes us for a very privileged glimpse of the last of the true ice-dwellers. Although a French national, de Poncins chose to remain in North America and he wrote his text about the Inuit in English, in collaboration with a friend. Not much is known about the author's life thereafter, as he did not publish much other work, but like G. B. Edwards's solitary yet wonderful book about life on Guernsey, "The Book of Ebenezer Le Page," this one book by de Poncins is a major accomplishment.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've ever read!
Review: I came upon this book PURELY by accident, and I now consider it one of the most fortuitous moments of my life! This is a fascinating and INCREDIBLY well-written account of a Frenchman's experiences living amidst the Inuit at the turn of the century--he is honest, hilarious, philosophical, and makes you feel like you're bumping along behind him on the sled across the tundra. I think it should be required reading of every single high school anthropology and sociology class. It is EXCELLENT!
Rating:
Summary: I lived there as a child
Review: I looked up at the bookshelf over my computer and spotted the battered 1941 edition of Kabloona that has been in my family for 40 years since I first read it in the village of Coppermine (now Kugluktuk) when I was a 12 year old boy in 1961. I decided to do an AMAZON.com search to see if anyone else knew of this marvel that had so enchanted me as a child, and found the site you are now visiting.
We were much more civilized in the Coppermine of 1961 than the same village the author had visited 20 years earlier. We had electricity, and communication with the outside world by a Morse code key at the Department of Transport office, plus we had a scheduled visit by a single-engine Otter every two weeks. It was a magical time for me (adults found it a difficult time, but they simply did not understand things)
The book Kabloona gave me insight into the minds of the people around me. We were a community of 200 Inuit (Eskimos) and 35 whites. The whites had as many of the amenities of civilization as they could garner, but the Inuit lived much as described in De Poncin's book.
I was enthralled by the awesome hunters with their dog sleds and their magnificent huskies, not show dogs or racing dogs, but working dogs that made the difference between life and death. The men would bring back the carcasses of seal and caribou, and the furs they had trapped. The women sewed the furs into beautiful garments that kept man, woman and child warm in intolerably hard winters. It was also the women's job to butcher the carcasses, which they did with incredible speed and skill using only the ulu, or woman's knife. I regularly witnessed the activities of this way of life. De Poncin described all this in his book, but he also gave me insight into the underlying culture I was immersed in.
You can't live the life I led 40 years ago as a boy in the high Canadian arctic, but you can vicariously journey there to an even more primitive time, and enter into the incredible peace and stillness of an arctic winter night in an igloo, or the warmth and safety of a house made of snow as an unbelievable storm rages outside around you.
I recently spoke by satellite telephone to a man in Coppermine from my home in Missouri where I now live, and found that the village I once knew is now a very different place. But you can go back to an earlier era with De Poncin. I assure you, you won't regret your wonderful voyage with him.
I don't know if I'm permitted to speak of it here, but I have described my life in those years in the Arctic in a book, The Boy Who Fell To Earth. It is available at Amazon.com for those would like to buy a hard copy, or can be read for free on my warmbooks.com web site.
Rating:
Summary: Left on the ice
Review: I read this book many, many years ago and have forgotten many of the details. I remember one, however. When the old one couldn't travel, they put her out on the ice and drove off. That is so relevant to our contemporary society and the discussions of social security and the elderly, caring for the disabled, etc. We can't leave the disadvantaged on the ice and drive off but must find some way to care for them.
Rating:
Summary: Left on the ice
Review: I read this book many, many years ago and have forgotten many of the details. I remember one, however. When the old one couldn't travel, they put her out on the ice and drove off. That is so relevant to our contemporary society and the discussions of social security and the elderly, caring for the disabled, etc. We can't leave the disadvantaged on the ice and drive off but must find some way to care for them.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: I recently bought it and read Kabloona in a weekend. The result was an incredibly valuable experience that has increased my awareness not only of Inuit life in the Netsilik area but of human behavior in general.Dde Poncins' prose is magnificent, even poetic. Numerous passages simply sing. Whether he is describing the describing bouts of cabin fever at the post in Gjoa Haven or celebrating the renewed vigor of villiage life that Springtime brings, De Poncins's eye for detail is refreshingly balanced and clear. What's more, Kabloona does not pretend to be an unbiased narrative. Instead, the author leads us through his physical and spiritual journey to show us how living with the Inuit has allowed him to become "a man preeminently." Certain passages seem somewhat romanticized, while others reveal the author's deeply-entrenched provincial values. The latter is evident when he describes an Inuit "pedarast" with a mixed sense of fascination and revulsion. But rather than hindering the narrative, such honesty and straightforwardness only enhances the humanity of this book. Kabloona is a thoroughly engrossing read that feeds into many areas of Inuit life, including myths, legends, and belief systems, as well as daily life and habitat.
Rating:
Summary: Some books stay with you for a lifetime
Review: It's been years since I read "Kabloona" by gontran de poncins. I don't remember the specifics of the book (I'm going to read it again, soon). What I do remember is the lingering humanity of the people. The hard life they lived. The culture shock between my life and theirs. I remember the mirror they held before me, forcing me to question our idea of "progress," "civility," and "modern man". Books such as "Kabloona" and "Black Elk Speaks" by John G. Neihardt and "Mutant Message" by Marlo Morgan tells us more about our roots as a species than many of the great thinkers and philosphers who speak in the abstract and grandeur of modern man. You read a book like this and you must pause and reflect, look deeper into yourself and the rushing stream you were born into. Step back and look at life from a different perspective. It can be life-altering or at the very least a stunning revelation.
Rating:
Summary: Some books stay with you for a lifetime
Review: It's been years since I read "Kabloona" by gontran de poncins. I don't remember the specifics of the book (I'm going to read it again, soon). What I do remember is the lingering humanity of the people. The hard life they lived. The culture shock between my life and theirs. I remember the mirror they held before me, forcing me to question our idea of "progress," "civility," and "modern man". Books such as "Kabloona" and "Black Elk Speaks" by John G. Neihardt and "Mutant Message" by Marlo Morgan tells us more about our roots as a species than many of the great thinkers and philosphers who speak in the abstract and grandeur of modern man. You read a book like this and you must pause and reflect, look deeper into yourself and the rushing stream you were born into. Step back and look at life from a different perspective. It can be life-altering or at the very least a stunning revelation.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting and wonderful
Review: My good friend and I were talking a while back after I had watched the movie The Fast Runner, which he had recommended. Talk got around to my deciding to send him my old childhood copy (out of print, I believe) of Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimos, and his deciding to send me his old childhood copy of Kabloona. Neither of us had ever heard of the other's book. I must say, as much as I've always liked Freuchen, I got the better of the deal!
What a wonderful book. So well written, such nice storytelling, so enjoyable, refreshingly honest, and unexpectedly insightful. It is haunting. It really is in a class by itself, although I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this is so. All I know is that I did not want it to end, as I'm sure the author did not want his time in the North to end. And, like him, I don't think it will be the same if I go back and try it again. And I know I also had a strange feeling throughout which only later I identified as a form of envy, envy for the experiences this man had and for his ability to experience them so deeply. I've seldom felt envy mixed with awe and admiration like this before.
Of all the book, I was most deeply moved by his account of the priest out in the middle of nowhere who had survived and kept warm in incredible cold merely through the power of faith and prayer. Humbling.
A man comes out of nowhere, lives these experiences, writes this incredible book, and disappears back into nowhere. Amazing. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: A lifetime book
Review: My wife and I usually read different books, but we both consider Kabloona one of the most interesting and memorable books we have read. It was wonderful to find that it was back in print, as we no longer have to worry that if a copy we lend does not come back, it will be lost forever. It is a completely engrossing and delightful book.
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