The Magnetic North
Notes from the Arctic Circle
-
- 10,99 €
-
- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title
More than a decade ago, Sara Wheeler traveled to Antarctica to understand a continent nearly lost to myth and lore. In the widely acclaimed, bestselling Terra Incognita, she chronicled her quest to find a hidden history buried in Antarctica's extreme surroundings. Now, Wheeler journeys to the opposite pole to create a definitive picture of life on the fringes. In The Magnetic North, she takes full measure of the Arctic: at once the most pristine place on earth and the locus of global warming.
Inspired by the spiraling shape of a reindeer-horn bangle, she travels counterclockwise around the North Pole through the territories belonging to Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, marking the transformations of what once seemed an unchangeable landscape. As she witnesses the mounting pollution concentrated at the pole, Wheeler reckons with the illness of the whole organism of the earth.
Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, shadowing the endless Trans-Alaska Pipeline with a tough Idaho-born outdoorswoman, herding reindeer with the Lapps, and visiting the haunting, deceptively peaceful lands of the Gulag, Wheeler brings the Arctic's many contradictions to life. The Magnetic North is an urgent, beautiful book, rich in dramatic description and vivid reporting. It is a singular, deeply personal portrait of a region growing daily in global importance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her previous book, on Antarctica (Terra Incognita), Wheeler dismissively labeled the Arctic Circle as "the complicated, life-infested North." She changed her stance in 2002, following a trip during which she towed her infant son on a sled while traveling with the S mi reindeer herders in the Arctic Circle. Readers are whisked away on an incredible, multifaceted tour of a region still unknown and mysterious. Her journeys, spread over a two-year period, begin in Siberia, nine time zones east of Moscow, in a region closed to foreigners and where there is no soil for anything to grow in a quarter of a million square miles. Traveling in a clockwise direction Wheeler's circuit includes Alaska; Canada; Greenland; Spitsbergen, Norway; Lapland; and back to the White Sea in Russia, weaving together fantastic stories of the North all the while. Wheeler admits this isn't a comprehensive history, but that makes little difference. This fact-filled narrative is nearly impossible to put down. Her theme is heroic individual struggle, such as pioneering polar aviation, heroism of the Norwegian resistance during WWII, and life in the Soviet gulag. By chronicling what the Arctic tells us about our past, Wheeler vividly reveals what it tells us about our collective future.
