Helpful Score: 2
This is a strange and fascinating book. Most geographical picture books (though this one has substantial text) include only photos that flatter the country or area photographed. One is usually barraged with the pretty and the beautiful, the cute and the appealing. This is the first such book I've come across that depicts a very forbidding place in true color without trying to gild the lily and make it appear less frightening than it probably is.
Labrador seems to be a strange place not at all hospitable to human habitation. The photographs of which this book is mainly composed do not at all make me wish to go there, though they do make me want to know more about it. The cold, the bare rock, the almost total isolation, in comparison make Newfoundland (immediately to Labrador's south) appear as a bright, almost Mediterranean luxury destination.
I once knew another boy, way back in 1954, whose father had disappeared in Labrador while hunting there. I can't remember whether he was lost falling into a crevasse or sucked up by a patch of quicksand. It was rather gross at the time (we were both 9) and I suppose has colored my picture of Labrador ever since.
Anyway, a very interesting book and highly recommended.
Labrador seems to be a strange place not at all hospitable to human habitation. The photographs of which this book is mainly composed do not at all make me wish to go there, though they do make me want to know more about it. The cold, the bare rock, the almost total isolation, in comparison make Newfoundland (immediately to Labrador's south) appear as a bright, almost Mediterranean luxury destination.
I once knew another boy, way back in 1954, whose father had disappeared in Labrador while hunting there. I can't remember whether he was lost falling into a crevasse or sucked up by a patch of quicksand. It was rather gross at the time (we were both 9) and I suppose has colored my picture of Labrador ever since.
Anyway, a very interesting book and highly recommended.
