Mowat's children's books (and all are boy's books) demonstrate his desire, on the one hand, to indoctrinate boys with his social concepts and values and, on the other, to retain the pleasant memories of his childhood. For the most part Mowat skilfully disguises his didactic intent. He hides it under narrative motifs and themes that have to do with wish-fulfillment, with the search for affection and security, with animals as a way of satisfying a child's wish to love and be loved,...

[When] a book is as dull, repetitive and simplistic as The Snow Walker too often is, one can only hope that readers will quickly learn to mistrust McClelland and Stewart's unblushing declaration that this collection of short stories "is among Farley Mowat's finest contributions to Canadian literature." This is not to say that The Snow Walker is without virtues…. The title story summarizes what might be called the thematic heart of the collection—the noble, dignified...

Farley Mowat has written twenty-four books since People of the Deer (1952)—which Hugh MacLennan called "the finest thing of its sort to come out of Canada"—and it's a rare and lonely season when no new Mowat graces the stands. This season Peter Davison has saved us with The World of Farley Mowat [a collection of Mowat's work]. Mowat's immense popularity has remained as constant and as changing as his favourite elements, snow and sea…. Adored by the mas...

The combination of dramatic setting and narrative skill that makes for a compelling tale is best exemplified in the books of Roderick Haig-Brown and Farley Mowat. These writers stand far above their Canadian contemporaries and rank high internationally. Both Haig-Brown and Mowat have come to the writing of outdoor books almost inevitably. Confirmed naturalists who have given years of their lives to exploring the Canadian wilderness, active and dogged campaigners for conservation, they have a feeling for the...

Veterans of bloody battle are not inclined to reminisce. Farley Mowat, the Canadian naturalist and author of some two dozen books, is no exception. According to the epilogue of his latest book, "So awful" was his experience of World War II "that through three decades I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cotton-wool of protective forgetfulness."… [Presumably] to demonstrate that it is not at all sweet and honorable to die for one's country, he decided to un...

One of the most difficult tasks any author can perform is to write a book that cannot be put down once one has started reading it—particularly when its theme is a pitiable cry in a wilderness. Farley Mowat has succeeded in achieving this with "The Desperate People,"… a well-written, sensitive, and lucid account of one of the most horrible sidelights of modern history. It is hard, if not impossible, even to attempt to review a book when its contents raise your most elemental passi...

In 1935 a boy of fifteen looked out of the train window on the line from Winnipeg to Fort Churchill in Hudson's Bay; there, across the track, flowed a great brown river a quarter of a mile wide—not of water, but of caribou: the annual migration which the first French explorers had called la Foule. From that moment he was infected with the Arctic fever; and it was this disease of the imagination that brought him back to the Barren Lands in 1947. He was dropped by aeroplane on a frozen lake near...

Fabulous events are rare and even rarer is a fabulist worthy of them. A Whale for the Killing is a magnificent instance of this conjunction, perhaps because Farley Mowat was not merely the chronicler of this little tragedy which provides a microcosm of our planetary condition, but also the fabulously conscious participant. The scene was Aldridge Pond, a salt-water enclosure on the southern side of Newfoundland, not far from Burgeo. Burgeo used to be one of many small "outposts" from which fish...

Depending on one's immediate mood, a lot can be found wrong in the writing of Farley Mowat: all sorts of laughable excesses, from sloppy style, overweening sentimentality, a kind of con brio enthusiasm for windmill tilting, to the sort of verbal keening one associates with a traditional Boston Irish wake, with the whisky flowing so freely one forgets just who is dead and why. This is not so much a disclaimer as an announcement of fact, and in Mowat's very particular case the fact doesn'...

Farley Mowat is the latest in a rather long list of foreign and mainland authors of distinction who have come to Newfoundland, settled for a time, and written books about their experiences here. I think it is fair to say that all of them have created distorted images of life in the province in their books, but some have nevertheless illuminated in a striking and original way the particular aspects of Newfoundland which interested them…. The outsiders who have given significant responses to Newfoundla...

In common with the majority of his previous works, The Snow Walker provides Mowat with a convenient platform from which to expound his passionately held convictions about the North and its people, but it also proves, to this reviewer's satisfaction at any rate, that Farley Mowat can be counted among the top story-tellers writing in Canada today. There are nine short stories in The Snow Walker, each of which plays some variation on the general theme of character in conflict with environment, and two n...

North of the Canadian mainland lies a vast archipelago of islands, surrounded by a drifting, ever-changing mass of pack ice. Wind and tide so change the extent and location of this shifting ice, that any ship venturing into these regions can be trapped, held and sometimes crushed and sunk in a matter of hours. And yet, through this archipelago lay the way to Asia—the Northwest Passage…. How did the first explorers fare in this huge, dreary labyrinth of bare land and ever-moving ice as they sou...

Farley Mowat's effort [in The Boat Who Wouldn't Float] is to show that a vessel may have a mind of its own such as to constitute a continuing frustration to its owner. Jocose the statement may be; many sailors will insist that a fabrication of wood, or even steel, into an "artificial contrivance used, or capable of being used as a means of transportation on water", can result in a being with understanding and will which must be cajoled, coaxed, entreated and persuaded before the ...

[In "And No Birds Sang" Mowat has written about his experiences as a soldier in World War II] in a departure from his usual subject matter, natural history, which he covered in such fine books as "Never Cry Wolf" and "A Whale for the Killing." His purpose in doing so, he informs us, is to put down the lie that it is worthwhile to die for one's country. The discovery he made, in the shell-pitted hills and valleys of Italy nearly 40 years ago, is that there are...

It would be much simpler to describe ["The Dog Who Wouldn't Be"] as a dog story, a good tale about an unusual dog, and let it go at that. But Mutt wasn't just a dog—indeed, as Farley Mowat says, Mutt was never content with being just a dog; he always wanted to be something more, and he pretty well succeeded. This is a good deal more than a dog story, for it is the story of a boy and his parents and dozens of neighbors and friends, tame and wild, human and almost-human. And...

In And No Birds Sang Mowat tries to do what in the midst of war he knew he could not: make those far removed from battle understand what it was like. Even after almost 40 years, the material is too powerful to accommodate itself to a personal memoir…. Through anecdote and story, the book does entertain.

On Sept. 14, 1948, the Leicester, a former Liberty ship of the ill-starred "Sam" series (so named after Uncle Sam) found herself several hundred miles at sea due east of Cape Cod, bound empty and in ballast from London to New York. At this point she ran into a great cyclonic storm, known only as Hurricane VII on weathermen's maps of that year…. Within hours the ship was wallowing helplessly in enormous seas, canted at the almost unbelievable angle of 70 degrees. Yet against all o...

The best boats float. Ask Farley Mowat, who bought one that wouldn't. Oh, his floated all right, after he'd had her hauled from the muck of a Newfoundland harbor and rebuilt her somewhat (from stem to stern, that is); but there was something about the Happy Adventure (sic) that made her more interesting than most pleasure craft (sic). She loved to fill herself with water and head for the bottom. Perhaps she really wanted to be a submarine. God knows, she tried often enough, the miracle being t...

To ["The Dog Who Wouldn't Be"], the portrait of Mutt, puppy and dog, Mr. Mowat brings a tender memory, a sharp eye for observation and a gift of expression that holds both poetry and humor. The development of Mutt as a hunting dog, from the day of his first hunt when he frightened the ducks by racing and screaming at them to the high point in his career when, on a bet, he retrieved a stuffed grouse for want of the real thing, is told with a nostalgic warmth rooted in a man's devo...

In his delightful all-ages book, "The Dog Who Wouldn't Be," Farley Mowat briefly told about the owls, Wol and Weeps. They deserved a book of their own, and here it is—["Owls in the Family,"] a wonderful tale of boys, owls and warm family life in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Mutt, the incredible dog, is here too, but only as a minor character. Wol was rescued as a pathetic owlet from a storm-wrecked nest. Weeps came out of an old oil barrel in an alley. They grew up toge...

[Farley Mowat] has already introduced the owls Wol and Weeps in a previous book, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be. [In Owls in the Family] their adventures are recorded for young readers, and their escapades are told with good humour and an accuracy which indicates an affection for the subject. It does not matter that the setting is Saskatchewan; children will respond to the genuine honesty and sensitive manner of the narrative. So rarely are animals allowed to remain their natural selves, that this is not an...