Chuffed to Hear “Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure” Praised Four Decades Later

This hour-long youtube video offers a brilliant book conversation between Chicago writers Alex Kotlowitz, author of the 1992 classic social welfare book There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America, and Donna Seaman, longtime editor of Booklist magazine, and author of the recent memoir River of Books: A Life in Reading, published by Ode Books, a cool imprint of Seminary Co-Op Bookshop and 57th Street Books devoted to books about books, bookselling, publishing, etc. Now that’s my kind of imprint!

At about the 25th minute of the video I was surprised and chuffed to hear Kotlowitz extol the nonfiction wilderness narrative Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure by James West Davidson and John Rugge, an engrossing wilderness narrative about an epic canoeing expedition in the Canadian north that the late esteemed editor Dan Frank acquired and published for Viking in 1986, which I then was honored to republish in 1997 as a Kodansha Globe title with a new Introduction by the late great Vermont novelist Howard Frank Mosher.

Alex Kotlowitz is right—Great Heart is a great book, and it was gratifying to learn it’s still being read and enjoyed nearly four decades years after it was first published, and nearly three decades after I brought it out again. #Canoeing #SurvivalStories

Here is the video of their conversation.