Kirkus评论

The Klondike experience in tote: reinterpreted by Canadian journalist and historian Borton (the 1956 Klondike Fever, among notable others); projected in photos of startling acuity and depth (many reproduced from glass-plate negatives); and packaged both resplendently (for the message, perhaps too resplendently) and sensitively, involvingly, movingly. In successive narrative sections, culminating in photo-displays, Berton stresses the feverishness, the rigors, the euphoria, the eventual let-down--as if, once the stampeders had reached Dawson, ""the adventure was over; there were no more barriers to breach."" ""Gold,"" he surmises, ""had been an excuse."" We have seen photos of each grueling stage of the journey--the tangle of trail, and a blow-up of dead horses; ""the great panorama"" of the instant-community known as the Scales (where supplies had to be re-weighed) and ever-larger enlargements of the men hauling those supplies up the steep, snowbound Golden Stairs. Berton notes, and we see, the false-fronts and ""sturdy"" prostitutes of short-lived Dawson--soon half-destroyed by fire (because of municipal penury, the firemen were on strike), then emptied by word of gold at Nome. First and last, Berton calls attention to the stampeders' faces: ""In the quest for Klondike gold, the soft young men photographed [on departure] in their neat mackinaws and jaunty furs finally lost their innocence."" Unwieldy and costly, but no coffee-table delectation; rather, a memorable conjunction of the power of pictures and the power of words. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.