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Eskimo Story Moves Beyond the Arctic
Judith Rosen -- 5/22/00
For a self-published book with extremely limited distribution--just three stores on the edge of the Arctic Circle--to sell 9,000 copies is unusual. But there's been nothing typical about Kenn Harper's Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo, which has just been reissued by Steerforth Press, the winner of this year's New England Booksellers Publishing Award.


For starters, Give Me My Father's Body is based on the true story of a boy named Minik, whom explorer Robert Peary brought back, along with his father and four other Inuits, from Greenland in 1897 as specimens for the American Museum of National History in New York City. Almost immediately, four of the Inuits, including Minik's father, died of colds that turned into pneumonia, and the museum used their bones for display. The fifth Inuit returned to Greenland, leaving Minik alone in New York, where he remained for 12 years. The book tells of Minik's life trapped between two cultures, and his struggle to retrieve his father's body.

In 1992 reporters from the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Washington Post wrote about Harper's book and Minik's struggle. The publicity spurred the museum to return Minik's father's remains to his family a year later.

In the meantime, Give Me My Father's Body, an underground classic among Arctic travelers since Harper first published it himself in 1986, attracted the attention of actor Kevin Spacey and Steerforth publisher Chip Fleischer.

News that Spacey wished to option the film rights emboldened Fleischer to ask the Academy Award-winning actor to write a foreword for the reissue.

The book's subsequent success--with Spacey's foreword--has been unusually strong for a small press with no ad budget beyond word of mouth and a former self-published author with an aversion to anything commercial. In less than a month, Steerforth sold out its first printing of 17,500 hardcovers and went back to press for another 10,000. Spacey optioned the film rights, and Pocket Books bought the paperback rights at auction. Audio rights were sold to S&S Audio, and foreign rights were sold in the U.K. and Denmark. Contracts are currently being finalized for Italy and Japan. Earlier, Harper sold rights to Germany, Spain and France. Give Me My Father's Body is also a selection of the BOMC and BookSense 76 pick.

Harper expressed relief at having Steerforth take over publishing and distribution in the U.S. and Canada. "A book's not going to be a success unless you have distribution. It sold for me because people went out of their way to buy it," he said.
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