I’m curious about buddy levy’s reputation with arctic historians!! Can you give me an example of something he just made up?
Totally! The biggest one that comes to mind for me is in Labyrinth of Ice there's a section where he talks about the men needing to leave the dogs behind (because they were transitioning to boat travel, and there was no more utility for them, in addition to there not being enough food.) Several of the dogs had been lost/shot along the way, but that's besides the point.
(Labyrinth of Ice, Buddy Levy, Ch. 13: Farewell to Fort Conger. Using an ebook, so don't have the exact page #)
Levy claims a dog named Flipper followed the Greely boats for as long as he was able, chasing after the animals’ caretaker, Roderick Schneider, before drowning in the Arctic Ocean. This anecdote does not seem to appear in other records. I have combed through every Greely publication I can get my hands on (including both volumes of Three Years of Arctic Service, which I believe is the most comprehensive source of the expedition). Some other dog names are listed, but Flipper does not appear among them.
There is also no evidence of this kind of dialogue ("I think it's Flipper/He's gone.") Some, not all, Greely journals (and other expeditions' journals) do contain explicit dialogue, but many are just "The captain said; the engineer said; etc." While this does allow the reader to immerse more into the story, it raises questions about what statements Levy quotes as being in the historical record were actually said vs. were speculative.
In my opinion, the Flipper anecdote was extrapolated based on the story of Disco King, seen here on page 38 of Vol II (pic is from my personal copy). But even if there was a dog named Flipper, he is not mentioned in any other records besides Levy's.
(Three Years of Arctic Service Vol. ll, A.W. Greely, pg. 38)
I've also read Levy's book Conquistador, which has much of the same problem. I'm not an Aztec scholar, but it reads much more like an action-adventure novel than an actually nonfiction. There's also a discussion to be had about Levy's approach to once again centering conquistadors in a narrative that is, at its core, one of cultural and physical genocide.
Like I said in the tags of the other post, I don't think Levy is a bad author. His writing is engaging and great for getting into Arctic history, but you have to take his specific research with a grain of salt. (Basically, there's no issue with enjoying his work as long as you go in with a critical thinking mindset, which can be said for most popular nonfiction). I also get a little peeved that he doesn't openly cite his sources. I know that's not common for popular history books, but it makes it harder to verify the information he's presenting as wholly factual.
