Customer Reviews

A Kayak Full of Ghosts: Eskimo Tales

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Ignore the eggheads reviewing this book. I lived in Alaska for years. Eskimos, Inuets, etc. are some of the most "humane" people you could ever meet. Perhaps retelling the violence and "perversions" of their myths and stories is one reason these people are so gentle and considerate in actual life, a lesson lost on Puritan America.

Expertly compiled and deftly retold by Lawrence Millman, A Kayak Full Of Ghosts: Eskimo Folk Tales is the first comprehensive anthology of Eskimo folk tales to be published in more than sixty years. Sometimes bawdy, sometimes bizarre, sometimes gruesome, and sometimes magical, the narrated stories comprising A Kayak Full Of Ghosts are a reflection of rich cultural heritage and of survival in a harsh land. Highly recommended for Native American Studies and Mythology/Folklore collections, A Kayak Full Of Ghosts is also a simple joy to read from cover to cover.

A vividly strange (and sometimes gruesome) but rich collection of Eskimo folktales from the barren, frigid Arctic. These odd tales weave themes of magic, taboo, old age and death throughout. They are derived from a remote land and a highly imaginative oral tradition.

To give you an idea, some of the specific stories describe men who marry rocks and old people who marry insects, children who grow antlers, children who eat their parents, animals who steal body parts from human corpses and women with iron tails.

This collection is a great read, (...and not for the queasy).

Highly recommended for any kayakers with a fascination for Greenland and Innuit history & culture

This book is not at all what I was expecting. Each "tale" ranges from half a page to a few pages, and is self contained.

These tales are quite imaginative with some being very funny, and some being gross. Some, you can't quite tell what to think of it. Likewise, some made sense, and some left me trying to figure out what the heck the tale has to do with anything at all, and what's the darn point.

I had hoped to gain some insight into Eskimo culture and some of the origins of their beliefs. I'm not sure I got that... but I'm not sure I didn't get it, either.

Nonetheless, it was interesting, and I shared many of the tales with family and friends, so I suppose it was worth the effort. Three quarters of the way through it, however, I got bored with it, and put it down. Some family and friends took a look at it, read 20-30 pages and gave it back. These friends aren't into the same things that I am (kayaking, canoeing, wildlife, camping, etc) and so were totally bored by it. I suppose this book is filling a niche, but it sure is a narrow one.

It will be a good source when you want to share something strange with a friend, but I'd be careful who I recommended it to.

this book is absolutely wonderful wonderful wonderful. A necessity for anyone interested in the inuit....it splattered my brain mush all across the arctic tundra.

Exemplary story-telling. The Inuit storytellers who created these tales made them to be re-told, to be laughed at, gasped at, wondered at, by ordinary people. Millman has done a service to readers. The ghosts of the original Inuit storytellers are undoubtedly more gratified by Millman joyfully sharing these tales with you and I, than by university libraries full of unreadable line-by-line literal translations prefaced with lengthy ethnographic "context." These stories can speak for themselves, and Millman allows them that.

I prize my rare and expensive academic Inuit ethnographies. But I simply love reading this book. These stories were meant to be enjoyed and shared, not just stuffed and cataloged.

JNH

I used also used this book for my college history class. It was very entertaining, but be forwarned that there is a lot of graphic and suggestive language in the book!

I was just reminded of this after reading a scatological posting on a peculiarly narrowly targeted Web site. This book is a phenomenal journey through the dark side of the human psyche, and--as may be expected--its concepts of "mythology" are anything but mainstream. Do not expect pantheons of radiant beings eating grapes and enjoying sexual delights or, for that matter, defeatist gods fighting giants while continually fearing the end of days (particularly after Odin slays Gullveig with Gungnir and Loki eats her heart). Neither should you expect "standard" story lines, such as Theseus slaying the Minotaur or Thor battling Jormungandr: stick to Padraic Colum and his Beardsleyesque drawing buddy, Willy Pogany, for that sort of thing. The character of myths ranges from scatological to sexual ("swinging," even) to necrophiliacal to cannibalistic to unclassifiable. Unfortunately, since so many of the myths are eponymously yclept for their protagonists, their names are utterly forgettable--Kiviarssuq and Aaqaqoq and Nuqtiluq, perhaps. One aspect I could not understand was that the overwhelming majority of the stories were not of the etiologic character that underlies the lion's share of, say, the Greek and Norse and Hindu traditions. To that extent, they could just as easily be taxonomized as mere folktales--with all that that implies and all that that fails to imply--revelatory of the shockingly limited range of the grossly vulgar colloquial Inuit mindset. (Fine, call me ethnocentric if you like: call me anything but late for dinner.) Just expect to be shocked senseless by jaw-dropping behaviors from weird people. The author offers us an unwitting foretaste of what lies ahead while talking of his visit to an Inuit friend, who was busily snacking on caribou droppings fried in seal fat, or regaling us with the compositions of other Inuit culinary delights, including odobenid vesica (that sounds so much more appetizing than "walrus bladder": you might even think it's a type of rare vegetable) swimming in saliva. There's more oddball material here than you can cut with an ulu!