Travel to Provinces

Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure (Kodansha Globe)

Format: Paperback
Author: James West Davidson
ReleaseDate: 15 December, 1996
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Rating:

S.K. Lapius
There is little written about this turn of the century, "last frontier" of North America where even today natives will tell you that you can't get there from here. This is a great read. The grueling hardship and trajedy are well portrayed - as are the portraits of each individual. It truly takes the 3 books written about this seminal journey and adds information from the diaries and other writings of the various figures involved; and, this is artfully done by shifting voices. The book flows well and holds suspense to a surprising degree even to those who know the eventual outcome. .

Good adventure story
The first took place in 1903 by three men, on which one of them, Leonidas Hubbard, died. This book tells the story of two expeditions across Labrador. Three years later, his wife, Mina, made the same journey successfully. These accounts are well written and make good use of the original journals.

Annoying novelistic style
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. As you can see from other reviews, most people seem to really like this book. 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.

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