"The Friendly Arctic"

BLACK SUNLIGHT--Earl Rossman --Oxford University Press ($1.75). With so many bold men preparing these spring days to explore by air over the icy wastes of the Polar Sea, this journalistic account of life on the upper fringes of Alaska makes a well-timed appearance. As Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson agrees in the preface, it is a good kind of introduction to "the friendly Arctic" for folk who have never been there, since Author Rossman was a tenderfoot when he took his cinema cameras to the Eskimo village of Wainwright* and settled down for the hard winter of 1923-24. An able newspaperman, Rossman put in his diary, and has here expanded, facts and fresh impressions which an habitue of the North might have omitted as commonplace: that an Alaskan city was called Nome when, in 1849, an Admiralty draftsman misread the notation "Name?"; that the

Malamute Saloon, brought to fame by Rhymster Robert W. Service, still functions tamely; that igloos are seldom built of snow, but usually of driftwood and turfs; that William T. Lopp, onetime U. S. education chief for Alaska, got the Eskimos started in the reindeer industry, of which Carl Lomen is king; that there is said to be a mountain of jade in the wild hinterland; that Eskimo seamstresses wear their teeth to the gums chewing deerhide into shape; that whaling parties will travel afoot 30 miles out on the unevenly frozen ocean hunting for open leads to watch for a blowing bowhead; that flocks of duck, whose northward flight beyond Barrow is strong evidence of land in the Arctic "blind-spot," fly so thickly and so low that the natives can lasso them with weighted strings; that the last suicidal migration of the Alas kan lemmings* was in 1888; that, protected against unmitigated sunshine glaring on ice and snow only by crude wooden masks or slit leather straps, the endless days are nights for many snow-blind Eskimos, days of black sunlight; that the Eskimo appetite is prodigious, measurable only by the amount of food available; that thieving is unknown among them; that at their indoor social gatherings it is customary for one and all to sit stripped to the buff; that if land is ever discovered beyond Barrow, and utilized for an aero base, Manhattan may be within two days and a half of Tokyo. Besides such statistics, human interest, personalities, abound. The one maddening thing is, that for a book written by a camera man, this one is most stingily illustrated.

* Near Point Barrow, northernmost settlement in the Americas and base of the current Detroit Arctic expedition under Captain George H. Wilkins (see TIME, Jan. 4 et seq., SCIENCE) which Rossman accompanies.

* Tailless mice, upon which, as a race, there periodically comes an urge to descend to the sea and drown by the million.