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Through Darkening Spectacles: Memoirs of Diamond Jenness.

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THROUGH DARKENING SPECTACLES: MEMOIRS OF DIAMOND JENNESS. By DIAMOND JENNESS and STUART E. JENNESS. Gatineau, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2008. ISBN 978-0-660-19802-6. Mercury Series, History Paper 55. xxvi + 407 p., maps, b&w illus., appendices, references, index. Softbound. Cdn$39.95.

Diamond Jenness' People of the Twilight introduced me to the Arctic 40 years ago. The very same copy I read as an undergraduate remains on my bookshelf to this day. I can't credit that first reading with turning my still uncertain occupational ambitions toward anthropology, or, once that die had been cast, toward studies of Inuit history and ethnography. But those decisions eventually brought me back to the book--actually, to its author--as curiosity about the storied past of my chosen profession, particularly its Canadian branch, inevitably led to Jenness, this country's leading light during the interwar period.

An expatriate New Zealander and long-serving scientist with Canada's National Museum, Jenness (1886-1969) epitomizes anthropology's mythical heroic age. Trained at Oxford when the discipline was in its infancy, he was by times a horse-and-buggy ethnographer, a...

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