Edith Iglauer

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“We are all of us fortunate that Miss Iglauer was present to chronicle some of (the Inuit) trials, errors, frustrations, exultations, bafflement, and sense of wonder at what they were doing. Whoever first suggested to Miss Edith Iglauer that she visit the Canadian Arctic deserves a medal.”
“Author Iglauer...flew to Northern Canada...learned how to walk in deep snow (bend the knees to exert a forward rather than downwards thrust) and got an Eskimo name...She tells the story deliberately and unemotionally, but she provides plenty for the reader to feel emotional about.”
“Ms. Iglauer has done more than record the development of a few cooperatives. She was a sympathetic and astute observer...candid and direct in her comments, writing with exceptional reporting skill. What she saw in these emerging peoples leaving behind the ancient nomadic ways and reaching for a better life, was an intelligent adjustment to wholly new concepts. The rich detail with which she approaches her subject stimulates one’s senses with an arctic world of new sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and impressions.”
“Take a writer from a sophisticated New York magazine, fly her into the barren, unfamiliar Canadian Arctic...and what do you get? Surprisingly, perhaps, one of the most moving books ever written about the Inuit people.”
“Over a period of four years, beginning in 1961, the author made four separate journeys into the bleak lands of the Eastern Arctic. In telling what she saw there of the efforts being made by a primitive people ‘to jump, literally for their lives’ into the twentieth century, she’s produced a beautiful book. Long after I ‘d finished reading it, I kept thinking of a sentence she quotes: ‘It seemed to me that a nation which puts such a tremendous investment into such a small group of people is a decent place to live.’”
“An anthropologist should read the book not for ethnography but for current history. Iglauer offers a fresh, nonacademic eyewitness account of experiments in community development in northern Ungava and on the west coast of Hudson Bay and reports sentiments publicly revealed by clearly identified officials and Eskimos”
“A study in depth of a social revolution for students of mankind - it’s a broad canvas and Miss Iglauer fills it with intricate detail...You’d never believe the warmth a writer telling of the people she loves could generate from so bleak a corner of the earth.”