An African in Greenland

Many Phinney readers (me included) are drawn to tales of the Arctic, but none drawn to strongly as Kpomassie, who encountered a book called The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska as a teenager in Togo in the '50s and became possessed by a desire to travel to the land of ice hunters and sled dogs. After eight years working his way across West Africa and Europe, banking on his skill with languages and his charm, he made it, and his report from the north is not that of an anthropologist or an explorer but an open-handed traveler (from a culture similarly colonized by Europeans). It's not an easy life he joins there, and he is not embraced by all—there is a memorable fistfight—but his open charm makes him as good a storyteller as a traveler, as interested in the individuals he meets as in the vast difference of their cultures.