Zest For Life [Hardcover]

The exhaustive - but unobtrusive - library research is just as impressive, as is the humane insight of a physician who has spent most of his adult life serving in the North. The Man Who Mapped the Arctic will likely become an outstanding classic on the crowded shelves of books about Arctic exploration.

It's a major accomplishment for the author - and the Yukon. Steele has set the literary bar significantly higher for all of us." -- The Yukon News

"The stuff of myth comes from a book like this.

I was most fascinated by the cumulative effect of the enormous quotidian detail author Peter Steele has brought to his subject. His wide-ranging research gives us a thorough sampling not only of Back's journals but of others' writing at the same time, and informative and appealing conjecture on 'what it must have been like,' the dark, cold forts, the starving natives camped outside, the fearsome ice, the intense hope aroused by a single first ray of spring sunshine. I was grateful for the generous excerpts from both Back's and others' journals that Steele includes in his account. Back's energy and buoyancy, his open appreciation of nature and women along the way, his sometimes tight-lipped, sometimes defiant descriptions of personalities unlike his own reveal him as a charming, optimistic, utterly intrepid, difficult and hot-blooded character.

Author Peter Steele is a doctor and the mountaineer who wrote Doctor on Everest on the ill-fated 1971 trip. He ran the Grenfell flying doctor service in Labrador before settling in Whitehorse. His love of adventure and physical vigour, of rough tripping and the psychological relationships between fellow travellers, is evident in this appreciative and finely researched account of the life of George Back, one of the north's great spirits. -- The Globe and Mail --This text refers to the Paperback edition.