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Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf Don MacGillivray Vancouver: ubc Press, 2008. 376 pp. $29.95 paper.
ANYONE WHO HAS delved into the gripping, sometimes impregnable, but always complex world of pelagic fur sealing on the north Pacific Coast knows just what a challenge the history of that subject poses. Then, to construct a biography of one of the most renowned and, depending on your point of view, notorious sea captains to have trafficked in that trade, and, finally, to compound matters with the fact that this trailblazing maverick of an individualist was the inspiration for a revered and classic icon in American literature, is to have taken on the proverbial Herculean task indeed. But that is just what Don MacGillivray, a professor of history at Cape Breton University, has done - and superbly. Seamlessly weaving together the divergent strands of nature, man, and daunting legacy into a deeply penetrating tale, Captain Alex MacLean is a tour de force that matches in its scope the towering persona of its subject, a must-read on one of our most compelling...