IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT

Nearly two decades ago Meyer (see review, above) wrote of her observations of life among the Yup'iks of Alaska in Eskimos: Growing up in a Changing Culture (1977). In it she wrote of a year in the life of a fictional village and a fictional family, the Koonuks. Meyer's new book takes a look at the same village and family a generation later, when the actions of the US government and the pernicious influence of the kass'aqs (white people) and kass'aq culture have radically changed the Yup'ik way of life and made it nearly impossible to preserve the old ways and traditions. As is true of Eskimos, this book is fairly informative and easy to read because of the fictional approach, but it carries a caveat. It's presented as a new book (``picking up where Eskimos had left off'') even though it more closely resembles a revision: Substantial chunks of text have been lifted, intact or nearly intact, from the older work. In some paragraphs, only a phrase is changed; in others, the tense of the verb is changed, e.g., ``the men still drive their snow machines'' now reads ``the men still drove their snow machines.'' Institutions that own the previous book may want to think twice before purchasing this one. (Nonfiction. 12+)