Publisher's Weekly Review
Shortly after her marriage in 1874, the well-connected Beaman discreetly induced President Hayes to offer her husband, John, employment--as a special government agent in the Alaskan Pribilof Islands, located close to the Arctic Circle. Heroically independent and, like her husband, a trained cartographer, Beaman was the first non-native American woman to set foot in this pitiless land. Her writings provide a gritty but romantic, feminist chronicle of her year-long sojourn. She describes both daily life--her relations with the Aleuts, teaching English to native children, keeping house, observing such natural phenomena as seals mating--and her own interior existence (``I do not know how to weep in words,'' she begins her journal). The Beamans survive a brutal seven-week winter storm; confined to one room and on the verge of starvation, they rekindle their passion for each other. John, their granddaughter, has neatly patched the fragments of Libby's diaries and letters with her own recollections of Libby's stories and with historical research. Illustrations not seen by PW . (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
Beaman spent a year with her husband in the Pribilof Islands, the first nonnative American woman to travel to those remote Bering Sea outposts of America. The journals and letters she wrote describing her experiences have been assembled a century later by her granddaughter, Betty John. Beaman narrates in somewhat gushing style her ordeal with primitive conditions, an Arctic winter, scurvy, and the hostility of her husband's superior. There is some personal drama, as well as interesting observations on the native Aleuts and seals, but this is a marginal purchase for most libraries.-- J.F. Husband, Framingham State Coll., Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
