The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World [Hardcover]

Robert McGhee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2005

Sea ice and the midnight sun, flaming aurora and endless winter night--the arctic of traveler's tales and romantic novels is the unattainable dream of a vast and desolate world--the last imaginary place on Earth.
Now, in this fascinating volume, renowned archeologist Robert McGhee lifts the veil to reveal the true Arctic. Combining anthropology, history, and personal memoir, this book dispels romanticized notions of the Arctic as a world apart, exotic and isolated, revealing a land far more fascinating than we had imagined. McGhee paints a vivid portrait of the movement of Viking farmers across the North Atlantic islands, and of the long and arduous searches for sea-passages to Asia. We meet the fur-traders who pioneered European expansion across the northern forests of Canada and Siberia, the whalers and ivory-hunters who ravaged northern seas, and patriotic explorers racing to reach the North Pole. Most important, McGhee offers far more coverage of the native peoples of the Arctic, societies that other histories usually neglect. We discover how northerners have learned to exploit a rich "hunter's world" where game is, contrary to our expectations, far easier to find than in more temperate lands. McGhee takes us to a thousand-year-old Tuniit campsite perfectly preserved in the Arctic cold, follows the entrepreneurial Inuit as they cross the Arctic in search of metal, and reveals the dangers that native people face today from industrial pollution and global warming.
Flavored by McGhee's personal reflections based on thirty years of work and travel in the region, here is a wide ranging, enlightening look at one of the most culturally rich and fascinating areas of the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The myth of the Arctic as an untouched wilderness penetrated only by the most intrepid of adventurers and populated by primitive peoples who had to be tamed along with their wilderness takes a beating in this refreshing primer from McGhee, the curator of Arctic Archeology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Coupling personal memoir with a broad historical overview, McGhee's book offers a more realistic view of the present-day Arctic and shows that, far from being cut off from the rest of the world, the Arctic peoples traded with their southern neighbors for thousands of years and have both influenced and been influenced by these contacts. McGhee draws on his 30 years experience as an archeologist to demonstrate that large-scale human migrations have occurred around the entire North Polar region, particularly in the past 2000 years, and that the current Inuit, Sammi, Nenets, Chukchi and other Arctic peoples have long histories that can be documented archeologically and through oral and written records. McGhee devotes an entire chapter to the fascinating history of contact between the Vikings and the Inuit in the North Atlantic, which occurred over a period of 500 years, until circa 1400. A later chapter describes the exploitation of the marine mammals living around the Spitsbergen islands. While not comprehensive, McGhee's book is an excellent introduction to the Arctic's history, peoples and contemporary political issues.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

McGhee writes in this compelling account, "the sea ice and the midnight sun, the whales, walrus, reindeer, the flaring aurora, and the endless winter night are viewed only as scenes and players in the human history of the polar zone." He presents this history as a part of what he calls the global history of human endeavor, exploring such themes as the Arctic in ancient thought; the role fur traders, whalers, and ivory hunters who benefit from an extreme range of seasonal variation; and the rapport between hunter and the hunted. He recounts life in Arctic Siberia, Vikings and Arctic farmers, life among the Inuit people, ice and death on the Northeast Passage, gold mining, and the early exploration of Hudson Bay. He believes that the Arctic is not so much a region as a dream--what he sees as a dream of a unique attractive world, the last imaginary place on earth. An archaeologist who spent 30 years there, the author lets his love for the region shine through on every page. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1St Edition edition (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195183681
• ISBN-13: 978-0195183689
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #484,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastically interesting history book., August 3, 2006

By 

Jessica (Hunter, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (Hardcover)

This is one of the most comprehensive historical books I have ever read. I don't know how Robert McGhee crammed such a vast history of such an enormous place into 320 pages. Of course, plenty of things were understated (particularly the Peary-Cook controversy) and a few things were drawn out and at times a bit dry (I found the chapter on Siberia to be slightly less interesting than the other chapters). Mostly though, McGhee is ultimately very fair in how he represents the various places he talks about, from Hudson Bay to Alaska to Spitsbergen to Siberia and beyond. No one region is represented as more important than another one, and reading the book, one comes to realize that all regions of the Arctic have very fulfilling histories.

Stylistically the book is impressive as well. McGhee speaks of Greely and Franklin ways that would spark interest in someone who had no interest in Arctic history. There are many summaries of dramatic events throughout the book, keeping his "human history" consistently interesting. The book, while being comprised of stories, is based wholly on research and historical record, which gives it a textbook feel from time to time, but even the pictures and maps (which, to my amazement, are completely left out of many Arctic-related books) give the book (and stories) a lot of life. In comparison to something like Frozen in Time which was much more science-based, yet easy for anyone to understand, The Last Imaginary Place is another account of a much more extensive history by an author who is extremely passionate about his work. This particular characteristic is not uncommon in today's Arctic writers (though, in previous decades/centuries, much of the accounting of expeditions was BORING).

In the end, this book could have turned out horribly dry and boring, it could have been a neutral history book with no particular feeling involved...instead, The Last Imaginary Place is a book you want to read every page of. There are priceless tidbits of information throughout the book, and from the pages about the Ice Age to Thule to the Vikings and on to 19th & 20th century exploration, there's nothing that can be flipped through without reading...to do that would be to miss something not only important, but something that would be enjoyable to read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Overview of Arctic Exploration, March 2, 2009

By 

Roger D. Launius "Historian" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (Paperback)

The arctic has long held a fascination for Europe and North America. It has led to numerous exploration parties and not a little mythology associated with the adventurers who undertook these missions. Archeologist Robert McGhee blends historical analysis with keen observation and strong writing to present a compelling account of Western Civilization's fascination with the Arctic.

McGhee begins with a study of the geology of the Arctic, noting that it was geology that proved that the Earth was older and more dynamic than religionists had argued. The ideal place that documented that fundamental fact was the concept of the Ice Age, and the data demonstrating that was found in the Arctic. He comments, "the fact that we think of the `Ice Age' as an established fact of prehistory is one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century science. For most of that century, science and theology fought an extended battle over the nature of the world and mankind" (p. 12). That realization finally took hold when Arctic explorers brought back evidence supporting it.

From there McGhee proceeds chronologically through the history of the Arctic, focusing successively on the hunter-gatherer tribes that claimed the region as their own, Viking incursion into Greenland and other parts of the northland, the Inuit and their evolution over time, the search for the fables Northwest Passage, and the quest for the pole, and the European quest for power in the geopolitical sweepstakes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The expression of a unique history of an exotic Arctic region makes "The Last Imaginary Place" a wonderful reading experience. It is a very fine introduction to the history of the region and its place in Western Civilization.

5.0 out of 5 stars overwiev of human history in the arctic, April 26, 2010

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Reader "kkbs" (Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (Paperback)

In this book Robert McGhee gives an overview of the history of humans in the Arctic. He starts with different concepts of the Arctic in Southern (ie. European) societies, and their evolution in time. Then he describes the movement of humans towards the Arctic, thereby disputing the classical argument that weaker societies were pushed towards the Northern periphery by stronger ones, while arguing that after the ige age such peoples just stayed within their known environment, which, due to increasing temperatures, simply moved towards the poles. After various, interesting chapters on native Northern societies, mainly in Asia and North America, McGhee deals with European and North American exploration in the Arctic and their consequences, from Frobisher through the exploitation of Svalbard until the cold war. Although personally I preferred the auhtor's more detailed account of early human societies in the Arctic (see Ancient People of the Arctic), this book gives an interesting overview of the history of the North and is written very well.