Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic
    Unavailable
    At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic
    Unavailable
    At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic
    Ebook183 pages1 hour

    At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic

    By Lawrence Millman

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    At the End of the World is the remarkable story of a series of murders that occurred in an extremely remote corner of the Arctic in 1941. Those murders show that senseless violence in the name of religion is not only a contemporary phenomenon, and that a people as seemingly peaceful as the Inuit can become unpeaceful at the drop of a hat or, in this instance, a meteor shower.

    At the same time, the book is a warning cry against the destruction of what’s left of our culture’s humanity, along the destruction of the natural world. Has technology deprived us of our eyes? the author asks. Has it deprived the world of birds, beasts, and flowers?

    Lawrence Millman's At the End of the World is a brilliant and original book by one of the boldest writers of our era.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 17, 2017
    ISBN9781250111418
    Unavailable
    At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic
    Author

    Lawrence Millman

    Lawrence Millman is a writer, Arctic explorer, and mycologist who has made more than forty expeditions to the Arctic and subarctic. He has taught at the University of Iceland, the University of New Hampshire, Tufts University, and the University of Minnesota. His eighteen books include The Last Speaker of Bear, Last Places, At the End of the World, Fungipedia, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Hiking to Siberia, Northern Latitudes, and Goodbye, Ice. He has received a Guggenheim Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lowell Thomas Award. When not on the road or in the bush, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Read more from Lawrence Millman

    Related to At the End of the World

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Time Travel with Historical Fiction

      Sep 15, 2022

      September is always a busy time of year. Students head back to school, many heritage organizations reset after Labour Day, and there always seems to be a lot of activities to pack in before cooler weather arrives. I sifted through my “To Be Read” pil

      8 min read

    • Article

      Welcome to SWEDEN

      Sep 1, 2022

      Welcome to SWEDEN
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Three English Graces

      Oct 20, 2021

      The English cathedral is one religious institution in rude good health. Parish churches die by the week. Congregations shrink. The young are vanishing. But, lockdowns apart, most cathedrals are booming. Their worshippers have increased by a third ove

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jun 16, 2022

      Last year I reported on a curious tradition from the Bassa people of Cameroon regarding falls of fish, crabs and other creatures from the sky [FT404:71]. Now I can share a case of fish falls embedded in a creation myth, as told by the Akuapem of sout

      11 min read

    • Article

      Time Out

      May 31, 2019

      Now, if there was ever a book that deserved the label of “weighty tome” it’s this one. More than 500 pages of recollections from moderately famous explorer John Rae. Probably best remembered for delivering the news that fellow explorer Sir John Frank

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Tourist in My Own Book

      Jun 22, 2017

      A Tourist in My Own Book
      12 min read

    • Article

      Mermaids And Sea Myths

      Nov 3, 2022

      Mermaids And Sea Myths
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Enduring Search For Endurance

      Mar 2, 2022

      I AM sitting at my desk in a Suffolk manor house that is a collage of dates: 1585, 1640, 1920. My study was once the housekeeper’s bedroom. Today, Wyken has no live-in housekeeper and the occupant who writes this was not to the manor born. All the pl

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Aug 10, 2023

      Reading the article ‘Here’s sick in your eye’ [FT431:50] reminded me of a book entitled We Are Electric by Sally Adee. In this we read that Alexander von Humboldt inserted a silver wire connected to a galvanic pile into his rectum from which he exper

      12 min read

    • Article

      From The Foreword To Debths

      Jun 27, 2017

      From The Foreword To Debths
      6 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 3, 2019

      And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. —Ogden Nash, “Everybody Tells Me Everything,” The Face Is Familiar, 1941 Someone goes by wearing a

      3 min read

    • Article

      Indianola, Onward

      May 14, 2019

      Indianola, Onward
      11 min read

    • Article

      On Travel Writing

      May 26, 2020

      On Travel Writing
      7 min read

    • Article

      Hogwash!

      May 17, 2021

      Hogwash!
      3 min read

    • Article

      Hogwash!

      May 17, 2021

      Hogwash!
      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jun 15, 2023

      Fortean Times never fails to provide me with something to think about, but rarely as much as the assertion that mass panics like Havana syndrome and transdermal fentanyl overdoses have become “endemic and long term” [FT430:7]. I’d previously assumed

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Last Naturalist

      Mar 1, 2022

      The Last Naturalist
      21 min read

    Reviews for At the End of the World

    3/5

    20 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      From the subtitle, one would think that Lawrence Millman's At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Artic would be a true crime narrative. It is, sort of, but much of this brief book is taken up with Millman's sour reflections on the digital age. The true crime aspect of the book is easy to summarize: in 1941 two Inuit men of Canada's remote Belcher Islands decide that they are "God" and "Jesus", respectively. Anyone in their small community who does not recognize their deity is labeled as "Satan" and killed. An insane old woman gets in on their act and murders some people as well. The crime spree is finally stopped when Canadian officials step in and, acting as both judge and jury, exile the perpetrators from their ancestral lands, a sentence that is the equivalent of the death penalty.The narrative itself is rather slight, so Millman rounds it out with diatribes against "Cyberians", people who spend their lives looking at their screens rather than experiencing the natural world. I concede his point, but his harping on the evils of "iDevices" and the foolishness of their users makes him come across as a cranky misanthrope.This book will appeal to the "neo-Luddites" who share Millman's views and those interested in the Canadian Inuit.
    • 4/5
      Not at all a chronological read, but more as musings, Millman wanders back and forth in thought and deed to the murders that took place in the Arctic in 1941. Most of these thoughts are only a few lines long but they are so extremely insightful, full of warnings and thoughts about our current addiction to all things that contain screens, our lack of care and indeed even notice of our natural world and original cultures and the danger our complete indifference can and have already caused.The Canadian Inuit, their ways and world, already indisputable changed. So many interesting factoids about this world, the people he met, the birds, the fauna and their customs, all being lost in the name of progress. Yet, he points out we stand to lose much more, have already lost much of ourselves, our society because what we consider progress, may in fact be anything but. Our current addictions to computers, games cell phones may have a higher cost than many consider. Lack of brain power, concentration, imagination, empathy and little notice of where or what we are doing.Not a book I read straight through, a good book to pick up and read a little at a time, but a very thought provoking book, made me take a wider view of things. Actually, went out and took a walk by the river, sat and thought about some of the things in this book. Where are we headed? And is it already too late? Things to ponder.
    • 2/5
      AT THE END OF THE WORLDLawrence MillmanMy Rating ⭐️⭐️▫️▫️▫️Publisher St. Martins PressPublication Date. January 17, 2017SUMMARYAt the End of the World is a story of several murders that occurred on Belcher Island in Hudson Bay in 1941. According to Lawernce Millman, those murders show that senseless violence in the name of religion is not only a contemporary phenomenon, and that a people as seemingly peaceful as the Inuit can become unpeaceful at the drop of a hat or, in this instance, a meteor shower.At the same time, the book is a warning cry against the destruction our culture’s humanity, along the destruction of the natural world. Has technology deprived us of our eyes? the author asks. Has it deprived the world of birds, beasts, and flowers?REVIEWHaving made a recent trip to Alaska I was looking forward to reading this book about murders that occurred in the Arctic. The book cover and book description are appealing. While I appreciated the Hudson Bay map, I would've loved to see a closer map of the Belcher Islands. Millman admits his tremendous struggle in writing this book and it shows. I would've loved to have seen more details about the murders, the people involved and the trial. The description of the terrain left me wanting to know more. I appreciated Millman's point about technology. I tend to agree that we spend to much time looking at our little screens and failing to notice the world around us, but I fail to understand the nexus between these murders in the Artic in 1941, and technology. The interjection of opinion on technology takes away from a very interesting story. Thanks to Netgalley and St Martins Press for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.At the end of the world rough notesIt's my belief that the book is about a story in 1941 orders that occurred as a result of man's will use a man's believe that he was God and other bins play so they were Fightin however the author tells the story of a very disjointed manner. Interspersing his thoughts about the Internet the lack of teaching writing writing skills in school and the issues associated with screen timIn chapter 19 for example he starts with a story March 12, 1941 with Arnie and Pete setting off a dogsled journey to the great well river to get to the Hudson Bay Company trading post it talks about how great a handler of dogs that Peter Wireless he states that Robert Flannery repeatedly feel filmed Peter in 1914 have a bobsled driver and it was captured in footage that was lost by Flarity and then he goes on to talk about how a person who know so much about about dogsledding could think that sled dogs might be why think that they were site and then he reverts to trip to the year 2001 and says the dogsled step then replace bus loop snowmobiles and Belcher have a snowmobile is efficient but you can't eat it if you get stuck somewhere and then he talks about some acronyms acronyms associated with snowmobiling and then he talks about I won't text you while breast-feeding and speculate whether the child will grow up associating phone screens with nurture and he said for himself he associates coffee with Marshall and then we're back perhaps in 2001 because somebody is telling him that they don't believe that big of a tackle our country on 911 really happened that they think it was just made up for TV The author speculates that there was a DVD in the stores at the store and if this person has seen it that would explain why he thought 911 was fictionThe author attempts to use Huber I guess all I'm making a correlation between people that live in Siberia Siberians and what he terms CYBERIAN those that are familiar with the Internet and how to use it. The Humour falls flat see location 627In in chapter 21 it talks about being about the wind wind blowing up tent down a how to get a hotel but there was a broken TV in his room America want to give my new room and he said no he likes room with a broken TV and then he visited since that's ITT wear since wife said that our Jack's father had been murdered and that's why our RV Jack had committed the murders himself sick but visited to recap I want to get soap stone for carvings I said sometimes the Slopestyle was blood red because of the murders and then sit gave him a gift of a polar bear car. Serves stop Septo have any moves into talking about electric that a gay on ecology of the area and how it was when Wendy that night and I don't in detail about what he talked about in terms I wants going to happen as a resultThe author jumps back and forth in time from 1941 to 1962 I don't know whenThe author includes comments from my notebook and questions rhetorical questions as the slides to stimulate the readers interest perhapsThe author somewhat critical of those that are using on any kind of electronic device for communicationOne of the most interesting parts of the book is found in chapter X regarding the trial associated with the murders that had occurred in previous years the royal mail to please have believe there was enough caused to try The self professed murderers and a judge was flown in to conduct the trial judge Paxton a jury was seated with none of the natives as your remembersThe author frozen seemingly random questions in the midst of telling a storyIn chapter 31 the author regaled us with his writing process for this book and even tells us of the type of pencil that are used to write with and all the troubles he had while riding and what direction to go inhIn chapter 230 to the author tells us about his interest in TUP I L a KS and how he went to Greenland after hearing about it to Peloch attackIn chapter 35 the author finally gets back to the trial the other has a running commentary on everything that is happened during the trial so he's not telling a story as much as commenting on his opinions on everything that happenedPro nature and anti screen/computerRantsQuestionsFrom my notebookPredujuiceQuotes from poets, naturalists and others with random thoughts
    • 5/5
      The Arctic has been the theme of many a book – tales of lost explorers, stories of oddball nothern "characters," and ecological parables of that bellwether northern zone. And yet some, though true in every particular to that portion of the earth which is their theme, have had a deep and profound resonance throughout a far wider swathe of our human experience. Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, and John McPhee's Coming Into the Country come to mind. Lawrence Millman's At the End of the World is one of these.Millman's central story – that of a fit of religiously-inflected madness in which a number of Inuit on the remote Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay set upon their neighbors, whom they regarded as incarnations of "Satan" – is the main, but in a sense only partial theme of this book. Our solid-seeming world may end in any of a great number of ways, not just a bang or a whimper – and Millman's genius here is a matter of sensing out the proportions. In the Belcher Islands, the whole universe might be condensed into a single village, one by the name of Sanikiluaq – from which vantage-point, during the author's visit there, the rest of the world was but a phantom on a glowing box. It's often observed that we southerners have little notion of the day-to-day nature of life in the Arctic, but the reverse may also apply – and so it was, that when by chance the destruction of the World Trade towers took place in the midst of Millman's visit, its image on the television became even more surreal. The Inuit residents were at first inclined to change the channel to something more amusing, like a Road Runner cartoon, but switched it back when one man observed "There's an American here, and his country is falling down."But that's just one "end" of one world. The other had come sixty years earlier, and the Belcher Islands had been its epicenter. It came in the form of a shooting star, which persuaded many Inuit there that perhaps the "end times" they'd read about in their syllabic Bibles were at hand. Its chief apocalyptic horseman was one Peter Sala, a local hunter who decided one day that he was God, and that anyone who didn't like that idea was probably Satan. Another man, Charlie Ouyerack, soon decided that he was Jesus, and God and Jesus joined forces to destroy the evil among them and prepare for the Second Coming. No rough beast ever slouched quite as low as these men, who began beating people to death and shooting them. Yet despite their depravity, their acts paled before those of Sala's sister Mina, whose mind gave way under the enormous pressure to conform to these new deities. She declared that Jesus was coming – right away – and summoned everyone out onto the ice. At her behest, many of them shed their fur clothing; the idea was that one should go to meet one's maker naked as the day one was born.Of course nearly all of them died. One woman, the only one who had stayed behind, came out to those on the ice, and managed to get several of them, including Mina and two children, to return to the village, if not to their senses, but six others remained and soon froze to death. The aftermath of these deaths, which were belatedly investigated by the RCMP, is its own story, fraught with all the issues of religion, local culture, and the line between murderous intent and mental illness, and Millman tells it well. But despite the book's subtitle, these stories, though at the heart of the book, are only one of its interwoven themes. From the glowing box in the house in 2001 in Sanikiluaq, we move back and forth – back to Robert Flaherty's filming of Nanook of the North in 1921, and forward to our own moment, and our own ubiquitous portable glowing screens. We have, in Millman's view, become our own islands, disconnected from any sense of ourselves as much or more than this isolated Inuit village is from the rest of the world. We have lost, in his view, something more profound than perspective -- we have lost our essential humanity, becoming the servants of the machines we built to serve us.It's a potent meditation, the more so for its dual anchors in the two worlds traversed by the book, and its resonance reaches far and wide. It remains possible, the reader discovers, for a single person in a small place to discover something about ourselves that the rest of us never stopped to notice. It's happened before – with Thoreau at Walden, Muir in his woods, or Rachel Carson in her office at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries – but it doesn't happen often. Millman's epigrammatic style – a departure from the straightforward (but no less lyrical) one of his many previous books – is its own sly benefactor; under its spell, we become open to insights that neither simple storytelling nor argumentative diatribes could have brought us.In the final chapter of Walden, Thoreau exhorts his readers to turn away from earthly exploration, to "be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes." In this book, Lawrence Millman shows us that it's possible to travel to both places -- the ends of the earth and our interior poles -- at the same time.
    • 1/5
      Good grief, I thought I was checking out a murder mystery, a true crime narrative that took place under the auspices of a mysterious comet in the Arctic, not a cranky diatribe against computers and the digital world. Millman very begrudgingly returns to the murders and trial that are supposedly the focus of this book but is easily distracted (irony?) by people using their "iDevices" and computers and relying on online information instead of observing the natural world. He interrupts the narrative constantly to point out people in his current world walking around with their eyes on their devices or relying on the internet for information. He can't go two pages without complaining about technology, and the story suffers terribly as a result. Just when you think you're getting some details of what seemed like an incredibly intriguing crime that happened in the Arctic, you get paragraphs like this: "... like a birder friend of mine. Using an app on his iDevice, he succeeded in identifying a semipalmated plover on Cape Cod's Sandy Neck beach in six minutes, while it took me less than a minute to identify the same bird using my app-free guidebook." If you want to hear smug, constant interrupting thoughts about how much the author hates the digital world and technology, read this book. (Actually, I'm guessing there are much better thought-out arguments and coherent narratives on this topic than this book.) But if you're looking for a "murderous tale" like this book was marketed, you will be very disappointed and most likely at least mildly annoyed.