My Life with the Eskimo by Vilhjálmur Stéfansson

Traveling to hunt, hunting to travel

Vilhjálmur Stéfansson (1879–1962) was a Canadian-American explorer and ethnographer. He was born in Manitoba, the son of Icelandic immigrants. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to the Dakota Territory of the United States. He was educated at the universities of North Dakota, Iowa, and Harvard. As an explorer, his area of interest was the Arctic, and as an ethnographer, his expertise was the Inuit or Eskimo (the former is the more proper term, but the latter was more widely used in Stefansson’s lifetime). From 1908 to 1912, Stéfansson lived among the Eskimo on the north coast of Alaska and Canada, studying their ways and collecting artifacts and data for the American Museum of Natural History, which afterwards published his scientific findings. In 1912, Stéfansson also published a popular account of his expedition, intended for general readers, entitled My Life with the Eskimo. At that time, Stéfansson’s more than three year sojourn in the frozen North was the longest Arctic expedition on record.

But did he use all that time wisely? If this book were all you had to go on, it wouldn’t seem so. Stéfansson’s stated aim was to travel eastward to find bands of Inuit who have previously had little or no contact with White people. He bounces around the Alaskan coast for two years, however, and 162 pages of the book go by before he even gets started towards that goal. Even then, the book makes it unclear what exactly he’s trying to accomplish. The bulk of the text is about hunting caribou and seals. Stéfansson needs to hunt to feed himself, his assistants, and his sled dog team. He travels hundreds of miles to shoot the food necessary to travel hundreds of more miles to shoot more food to travel hundreds of more miles, and so on. Almost every animal they see, they kill, either for the meat, the skin, or as a specimen for the AMNH. Also a member of the expedition is a zoologist named Dr. Anderson, but he and Stéfansson are never in the same place, and the two are constantly traveling hundreds of miles to look for one another.

While all this is going on, Stéfansson is conducting scientific research, but he doesn’t tell you much about it. He’ll say, “I collected folklore from the people in this village.” That’s great. Would you like to tell us a little about that? No, let’s get back to another hunting story. Not until after page 360 does he finally discuss some of the archaeological digs, ethnological research, and linguistic studies that he conducted. These topics, much more interesting than all the caribou hunting, are relegated to the last few chapters of the book, treated as if they were appendices. If the entire book were more like these last 70 pages, My Life with the Eskimo would have been a much more satisfying read.

Reminiscent of another popular expedition narrative, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki (1948), Stéfansson also has an ethnological thesis to argue in My Life with the Eskimo. In his travels, he encounters what he calls “Blonde Eskimo”—Inuit with light hair, light skin, and blue eyes. Stéfansson theorizes that these may be the descendants of Danish and/or Norwegian settlers who disappeared from the west coast of Greenland centuries ago and perhaps drifted westward. Unlike Kon-Tiki, Stéfansson does not belabor the point. This theory is not the book’s raison d’etre, just one matter discussed among many. Though Stéfansson’s hypothesis of the Blonde Eskimo’s Norse origins does not seem so farfetched, as with Heyerdahl’s theory, 21st-century DNA testing has since disproved it.

I read quite a few explorer memoirs, and this one is just mediocre. Stéfansson is clearly very knowledgeable about the Inuit, but writing for the general public does not seem to have been his forte. Again, the last 70 pages of this book are quite good, but up to that point there’s a fair amount of boredom between nuggets of interest.

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby

The disheartening saga of the separation of church and state

Susan Jacoby is a former journalist and an outspoken atheist who has published a few books on the history of atheism and freethought, among other topics. Her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was published in 2004. “Freethinker” is a blanket term that could be used to describe those who don’t subscribe wholeheartedly to any formal organized religion—perhaps anyone from a hardcore atheist to a liberal protestant. In American history, the term may refer to many of the founding fathers who were deists (e.g. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine) or to the atheist and agnostic activists of the late 19th and 20th centuries (e.g. Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clarence Darrow, Madalyn Murray O’Hair). Was Abraham Lincoln a freethinker? Jacoby looks into that too. Basically anyone who believes in the separation of church and state is covered here. The book essentially charts the changing status of that separation from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution to the end of the 20th century.

This is not an impartial, objective history. Jacoby certainly has an axe to grind, but that’s part of her point. The real history of freethought has been suppressed by American religious factions, and the only person who would write a book like this is a true nonbeliever. Many of America’s founders were freethinkers, yet today a myth persists that the U.S. was established as a Christian nation. Historically, many White Christian clergy in America were pro-slavery, anti-women’s rights, and anti-civil rights, and encouraged their congregations to toe those party lines, yet somehow when you read today’s history textbooks you’d think that all those problems were solved by the God-fearing faithful singing “Amazing Grace.” Jacoby sets the record straight from a freethinker’s perspective.

This book often reads less like a history of freethinkers than a history of freethought’s adversaries. It’s as if Jacoby defines freethinkers by their challenges, and their persecutors seem to get more coverage than the secular saints they’re persecuting. The book includes entire chapters on Catholics and their exertion of influence on American government. Jews, on the other hand, have generally been political allies of freethought who often found themselves grouped with atheists as alleged radicals and communists. Jacoby discusses the movements to abolish slavery, win women’s suffrage, teach evolution in schools, and make abortion legal, all of which were notably supported by freethinkers.

For an American freethinker such as myself, this book can be really depressing. Among the events chronicled, there are few freethought victories here. The one high point is the popularity of Robert Ingersoll in the 1880s and ‘90s. Thomas Paine is another hallowed freethought luminary, but sadly he ended his life more reviled than revered. By the time you get to the late 20th century, you’re convinced that the United States is one step away from becoming the Christian equivalent of the authoritarian Islamic regimes of the Ayatollahs or the Taliban. Jacoby repeatedly and bluntly points out how Christian Conservatives have subverted the Constitution for their own theistical agenda. This book ends with the George W. Bush administration, which Jacoby considers the low point in the ongoing battle for the separation of church and state. Things have only gotten worse since then—not because Donald Trump is more religious than Bush, but because Trump’s administration cozies up to religious interests to further his conservative aims. I’m glad somebody told this story, and Jacoby tells it well, but the truth hurts.   

The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

Landmark space opera, corny but creative

The Skylark of Space is a science fiction novel by E. E. Smith (1890–1965). Sometimes credited as Edward E. Smith, or referred to by his nickname “Doc,” Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, but soon moved to the Pacific Northwest and eventually worked as a food chemist for a doughnut factory in Michigan before starting his literary career. Though he published over a dozen sci-fi novels, he never did give up his day job. The Skylark of Space was first published in serial form in three 1928 issues of Amazing Stories magazine. The novel inspired one of the most memorable covers ever to grace the front of Amazing Stories, illustrated by Frank R. Paul. Smith usually gets all the credit for The Skylark of Space, but he cowrote the first portion of the novel with Lee Hawkins Garby, who happens to be a woman. Smith penned the rest of the Skylark series himself. The Skylark of Space was first published in book form in 1946.

In his laboratory, the chemist Dick Seaton investigates the properties of a newly discovered and extremely rare element known only as “X.” Unexpectedly, a lab instrument, made of copper, is propelled through the window, flying at high speed on a straight trajectory into the unseen distance. Seaton discovers that X has unlocked the “intra-atomic” energy within the copper, thereby releasing a clean, extremely powerful, and optimally efficient form of energy. Seaton and his friend, the millionaire industrialist Martin Crane, envision this new energy source providing the propulsion necessary for space travel. With the intention of exploring the stars, they begin building a spacecraft dubbed the Skylark. Seaton’s scientific colleague Marc DuQuesne, however, wants to steal the X for himself and will stop at nothing to get his hands on it, even over Seaton and Crane’s dead bodies.

When it appeared in Amazing Stories, this novel had a profound influence on young readers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and John W. Campbell Jr., who would go on to become some of the most important names in science fiction. What likely appealed to those future authors were the “hard science fiction” elements of the story, rather than its less successful fantasy and romance aspects. In this novel, Smith, a true scientist himself, deliberately strives to explore various scientific phenomena, and he provides reasonable scientific explanations for the bizarre happenings in the book. Obviously, the Skylark’s copper-fission propulsion method is not a reality, for example, but it’s based on real scientific concepts and is treated with a respectably sound science-fiction logic. The chemical properties of metals and the technological and military applications of various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum are also explored.

It’s in the human and alien characters where the novel becomes farfetched. The love stories are corny beyond all get-out, and the extraterrestrial beings are like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasy. The novel starts out as a down-to-earth Thomas Edison pastiche, but it just gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. It’s comical that Seaton and Crane express absolutely no surprise or wonder at their experience of interstellar travel. They treat their space voyage and contact with an alien race as the most natural and expected occurrences. The irrational behavior of the villains is even sillier. Some elements of the story are merely kitschy with antiquity, like the idea of fur suits keeping one warm in the nearly absolute-zero vacuum of space.

The Skylark of Space reads like a literary bridge between the works of Jules Verne and Robert A. Heinlein. The story of space princes, warring alien races, and starship battles is clichéd space opera, but those same clichés have nevertheless proved successful in many subsequent sci-fi epics from Star Wars to Dune. Sporting cool tech and exciting battle scenes, The Skylark of Space was no doubt considered quite cool by sci-fi fans of 1928. In spite of its hokier aspects, it’s still quite fun to read today.

Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life by Hal Needham

Tall tales of moviemaking dripping with testosterone

Growing up in the 1970s, I enjoyed the movies directed by Hal Needham: Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run, and their sequels, for example. At the time, Burt Reynolds was the biggest box office star in the world. Needham’s films help make Reynolds a star, and vice versa. Before becoming a director, however, Needham had a long career as a sought-after stuntman and stunt coordinator for Hollywood productions, Westerns in particular. He even owned a ranch where stunt horses were trained. In 2011, two years before his death, Needham published his autobiography Stuntman! Not surprisingly, Needham’s memoir depicts a life not unlike those larger-than-life movies he made with Reynolds, full of fast cars, fast horses, fast women, and lots of booze.

Stuntman! is mostly a film-industry memoir, but the first chapter and a half do cover Needham’s life before making movies. He grew up dirt poor in Arkansas, literally the son of a sharecropper. As a youth, he and his brother often had to hunt and fish for the family dinner. After his family moved to St. Louis, he enlisted to fight in the Korean War but was never sent overseas. Following his discharge from the service, he moved out to Los Angeles on a whim. In a lucky stroke, he managed to parlay his work as a tree trimmer into a career as a stuntman.

Needham was best friends with Reynolds and lived in Burt’s house for a while. Don’t expect a lot of behind-the-scenes looks into the lives of celebrities from this book, however. Burt is a bit of a shadow figure in this narrative; Needham reveals more about the personalities of Richard Boone and John Wayne. Almost all of the stories in this book take place on movie sets. Needham relates the stunts he orchestrated and performed in various films. At times it reads like a how-to manual for stuntmen: This is how you flip a car. This is how you stage an epic fall. This is how you jump out of a low-flying airplane. In his free time, Needham, who’s known for his car chase films, engages in other automobile-related activities like attempting to break the speed of sound in a rocket car, racing across the country in the real cannonball run, and owning his own NASCAR team.

Needham is about as macho as they come. He’s basically the Burt Reynolds character from his movie Hooper. He’s likable enough as a storyteller, but he’s got some ego on him. Anything anyone can do, he can do it better, and every idea he has is genius. He never admits to making a mistake. Every woman wants him. The relentless self-aggrandizing becomes tiresome after a while. He’s the Baron Munchausen of redneck good-ol’-boys. Also, as a man’s man, Needham has to be the world’s greatest partyer. He drinks at every occasion, and often drives or operates other heavy machinery while drunk. Some of his drinking stories are funny, but you can’t help thinking he’s the drunken jackass who’s weaving all over the lane next to you while you’re just trying to make it home safe.

With the possible exception of the first Smokey and the Bandit, none of Needham’s films would be characterized as smart, and this book doesn’t come across as very smart either. But Needham’s movies were good dumb fun, and so is this book. One of the reasons I enjoy the action movies of 1960s and ‘70s is because of the authentic pre-digital stunts. There was no faking it back in Needham’s day, and by his account, safety was not priority one. This book is a good nostalgia trip through that era. In today’s movies, so many action scenes are digitally created or enhanced, and action movies have become tiresome as a result, which begs the question, Where’s the next Hal Needham when we need ‘im?

Westerns by Elmore Leonard (Library of America)

The modern master of the genre

The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher that puts out authoritative hardcover editions of works by American authors, essentially establishing a “canon” of American literature. They began with reliable classic old books by dead guys—Melville, Twain, London, Emerson, and so on—but over time have expanded into collections of more recent authors’ writings, with mixed results. Some of their choices are not exactly canon-worthy, but one American author who certainly does deserve a spot in the LOA pantheon is Elmore Leonard (1925–2013). The Library of America has published four volumes of Leonard’s work. Three are devoted to his crime novels; the fourth and most recent volume, entitled Westerns, was published in 2018.

Leonard is best known for his crime fiction and thrillers, but he originally began his literary career writing Western stories for pulp fiction magazines. His Western fiction, however, is more than just standard Wild West adventure literature. Leonard has consistently demonstrated himself to be one of the all-time masters of the Western genre. This volume from the Library of America includes four near-perfect Western novels: Last Stand at Saber River (1959), Hombre (1961), Valdez Is Coming (1970), and Forty Lashes Less One (1972). One thing notable about these novels is that three out of the four feature Native American, Latino, and Black protagonists that are handled in a realistic and sympathetic manner that unfortunately was not the norm for 1960s and ‘70s Westerns.

The novels are followed by eight of Leonard’s short stories, all of them quite good. Leonard set most of his Western stories in Arizona. They tend to be situational thrillers involving good folks persecuted by hostile Apaches, cattle rustlers, bandits, or corrupt land barons. The best of the short stories presented here is “The Tonto Woman,” which is also the latest selection, from 1982. The rest were originally published in the 1950s. As is usual for the Library of America, this book also provides a chronology of the author’s life and career, which in this case amounts to a detailed, comprehensive biographical sketch of Leonard.

Leonard’s body of work has been the basis for many film adaptations. Hombre (1967), directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman, and 3:10 to Yuma (1957), directed by Delmer Daves and starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, are two excellent Western film classics. The latter was remade fifty years later with Russel Crowe and Christian Bale in the lead roles. Valdez Is Coming was also adapted into a 1971 film starring Burt Lancaster. Last Stand at Saber River became a made for TV production starring Tom Selleck (1997). Director Quentin Tarantino bought the rights to Forty Lashes Less One but hasn’t done anything with it. Leonard’s story “The Captives” was also made into a great movie entitled The Tall T (1957) starring Randolph Scott. “The Tonto Woman” was adapted into a short film (2008) that garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short. Not all of these films are masterpieces, but they’re all well worth a watch. I cite them here as evidence of Leonard’s prominent and enduring influence on the genre.

Even readers who don’t typically like Westerns may still enjoy Leonard’s suspenseful plots and clever dialogue. His writings have an appeal that transcends genre boundaries. If you liked Get Shorty or Justified, you might very well like this as well. The only Western book I can think of that’s comparable in literary merit and entertainment value to Leonard’s novels is Charles Portis’s True Grit. If you like Westerns, then you should definitely check out Leonard’s work, and if you’re going to buy a paper hard copy edition, why not get this top-notch volume from the Library of America? They do hardcovers right.

Novels included in this volume
(all previously reviewed at Old Books by Dead Guys)

Last Stand at Saber River 

Hombre 

Forty Lashes Less One 

Valdez Is Coming 

Short stories included in this volume

Trail of the Apache 

The Rustlers 

Three-Ten to Yuma 

Blood Money 

The Captives 

The Nagual 

The Kid 

The Tonto Woman 

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part II: 1940–1943

Finding his stride, but still all over the map

This is the second of three posts reviewing the complete short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Part I covered his career from 1832 to 1839. Part II looks at his stories published from 1840 through 1843. In this second batch of stories, Poe definitely shows improvement from his writings of the 1830s. Most noticeably, he no longer feels the need to fill his stories with gratuitous references to classical literature, romantic poetry, and untranslated quotes in various languages—at least not in his horror and mystery stories, which seem aimed at an intelligent general public. His humorous stories, however, still come across as pretentious, as if he were trying hard to show off his erudition. His comedic efforts are also not very funny, at least not 150+ years after the fact, anyway.

In the early 1840s, Poe wrote several of his best-known stories, tales that most readers would consider “classic Poe.” In his pioneering mystery story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poe introduces the detective C. Auguste Dupin, an influential precursor to Sherlock Holmes and many other literary sleuths. Dupin makes a second appearance in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” While “Rue Morgue” is a near-perfect classic, “Marie Rogêt” is merely good and suffers from a lack of conclusion. In the horror department, Poe made great strides with landmark offerings “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Upon rereading, the latter story feels a bit overrated—a Rube-Goldberg torture scenario that pulls its punches in the end—but the rest have held up well and deserve their acclaim as masterworks of the genre. “The Oval Portrait” and “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” are not great, but at least they’re in the right ballpark. “The Gold-Bug,” another of Poe’s best, is more of an adventure story in the same vein as many of Jules Verne’s adventures.

Outside of those genres for which he’s known, Poe is less successful. Humor stories like “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” and “Three Sundays in a Week” are lackluster comedic offerings in which Poe spends the entire story pointing out the absurdity of an idiom. “The Island of the Fay” is an inconsequential brief involving faeries. “The Man in the Crowd” consists of descriptive street scenes that never really lead anywhere. “The Landscape Garden” is not really a story at all but rather an essay on what makes a good garden.

Overall, this bunch of stories is better than his earlier work, but still the overall effect of Poe’s oeuvre is less than impressive. In reading his complete works, I’ve learned that one would be better off avoiding his humorous stories, which only serve to lessen one’s assessment of Poe as a writer. It would serve one better to look for a collection with a title such as Tales of Mystery and Terror, which is likely to contain most of his stories worth reading. Still, I’m going to stick it out for the last third of his career and will report back when I’ve finished.

Stories in this collection

Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling

The Business Man

The Man of the Crowd

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

A Descent into the Maelström

The Island of the Fay

The Colloquy of Monos and Una

Never Bet the Devil Your Head

Eleonora

Three Sundays in a Week

The Oval Portrait

The Masque of the Red Death

The Landscape Garden

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Tell-Tale Heart

The Gold-Bug

The Black Cat

Diddling

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Fascinating tetrabiography of sci-fi luminaries

John W. Campbell (1910–1971) was the longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Isaac Asimov once called him “the most powerful force in science fiction ever.” Through the pages of Astounding, Campbell elevated science fiction from a pulp-fiction amusement to a serious exercise in speculative science aimed at an intelligent adult audience. Alec Nevala-Lee’s 2018 book Astounding is a joint biography of Campbell and three prominent science fiction authors whom he discovered, developed, befriended, and tormented: Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard. Through the intertwined lives of these four figures, and their personality quirks and strange obsessions, Nevala-Lee charts the history of the science fiction genre from its niche beginnings, through World War II and the Atomic Age, to its acceptance and ubiquity in mainstream American culture.

Originally titled Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the magazine was founded in 1930, not by Campbell, but he took over as editor in 1937 and held that position until his death in 1971. The publication went through a number of minor title changes, all of them begining with “Astounding.” In 1960, however, Campbell drastically changed the title to Analog Science Fact & Fiction, a change no one seemed to like but himself.

Of this book’s four main characters, Asimov comes across the most sympathetically in Nevala-Lee’s narrative. He’s shown as a nice guy, not too egotistical, but a terribly horny lecher. If he had lived several decades later, his career would have been cancelled by the Me Too movement. Hubbard is shown as a shameless braggart and schemer who pathologically lies about his background and achievements. For much of the time period covered here, he was the most financially successful author in sci-fi, but Nevala-Lee thinks his work is hacky and mediocre at best. Heinlein, on the other hand, is presented as the G.O.A.T. of science fiction. His personality is harder to pin down. He definitely had a big ego, but given his talent, that was probably justified. He comes across as the smartest and most serious of the four and uncompromising in his unconventional views. Campbell, though praised for his literary influence, is deservedly castigated for his overt racism and sexism. All four of these guys, by the way, were swingers to some extent, so their love lives make for lively reading, although one feels sorry for their wives.

Hubbard was, of course, the founder of Scientology, and that plays into this story quite a bit as well. Campbell was a collaborator or at least a supporter in the creation of Dianetics, the psychotherapeutic precursor to the religion of Scientology. Nevala-Lee makes Hubbard out to be a flim-flam man who just used Dianetics to con people for financial gain. Campbell, on the other hand, was a true believer who saw Dianetics as a tool for increasing human potential. He was obsessed with “psionics”—heightened mental powers such as ESP, ancestral memories, or telekinesis—and he often steered the contents of Astounding/Analog in that direction. (Frank Herbert’s Dune—right up Campbell’s alley—was first published in Analog). When writing about Hubbard, Nevala-Lee treats Dianetics as a scam. When writing about Campbell, however, Nevala-Lee makes it sound like his weird psychological experiments were actually successful­ and then doesn’t bother to examine how or why that might be. If Nevala-Lee means to paint Campbell’s pursuits as pseudoscience, he doesn’t sufficiently discredit them.

That’s the only reservation I have about this book. Though I am not by any means a science fiction expert, I was fascinated from cover to cover. You never know which way this story is going to twist and turn because these four guys were so idiosyncratic—a polite word for messed up. While envisioning alternate worlds, each tried to fashion his life into his own personal utopia, somehow above the rules of the real world. They treated their work and their lives like science experiments, and in this book they often resemble mad scientists engaged in cockamamie or failed experiments. The pulp fiction era was an exciting time in publishing that generated a lot of classics and a lot of trash. Nevala-Lee brilliantly captures that time in science fiction’s history, the genre’s triumphs of creativity, and its sometimes misguided hopes and dreams for the future.