Product Description

Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers, Sara Wheeler uncovers the beautiful, brutal reality of the Arctic. When she puts up her tent on the top of the Greenland ice sheet, she experiences climate change at the sharp (and cold) end. "The Magnetic North" is a spicy confection of history, science and reflection in which Wheeler meditates on the role of the Arctic in public and in private. The fragmented circumpolar lands were a repository of myth long before the scientists and oilmen showed up (not to mention desperado explorers who ate their own shoes), and the hinterland north of the tree line has fed literary imaginations from Dickens to Chekhov. "The Magnetic North" tells of all this, plus gulag ghosts, old and new Russia, colliding cultures and bioaccumulated toxins in polar bears. The unowned homogeneity of the Antarctic that enchanted the youthful author in the bestselling Terra Incognita finally finds a counterpart in the embattled polar lands at the other end of the earth. The complex and ambiguous Arctic, Wheeler writes, 'perfectly captures the elegiac melancholy of middle age'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8802 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Review
"Wheeler writes about travel so well because she delights in travelling...She has a rare and precious talent."
--Scotsman

"...a wise, provoking and zestful chronicle, poetic, often tragic and always engaging." --The Sunday Times

"A superb account of her circumpolar wanderings...Wheeler is an excellent narrator, intelligent, amusing, poetic and down to earth."
-- Literary Review

"a fusion of history and myth...elegant and intelligent". --Books Quartely

`Wheeler's beautiful language and riveting narrative add up to a powerful account of what is at stake and what has already been lost' --Irish Times

`... is an entertaining mix of popular science, history and reportage, wrapped up in some seriously fine writing.' --The Mail on Sunday

`wonderful account of her journeys through the region.' --Financial Times

`Wheeler is excellent company .... with her observations on the consequences of our actions always well balanced and open-minded.' --Big Issue (London)

'The prose is startling and sharp-edged as the icy landscapes themselves'
--Financial Times

` an ambitious, adventurous, well-researched, spirited account' --The Tablet

"[Wheeler brings] and open-eyed sense of salutary wisdom and timely protest to her view of the Arctic Ocean and its surrounds" --The Scotsman

`elegant prose ... like the best travel writing, is infused with the writer's reflections on growing up, life and death' --* Telegrap Telegraph

About the Author
Sara Wheeler is the author of five previous books, including Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Too Close to the Sun: The Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton.

Customer Reviews

Review
This is an excellent book giving all sorts of information that you would not normally come across in everyday life - the people, the geography and particularly how the politics of different times have influenced the peoples living in the Arctic region.

If I have any criticism at all, it is the extremely flowery language used. The author mentions words I have never heard of and uses metaphors and similes without mercy. I think the editor should have insisted on a number of cuts in this department (perhaps he/she did and what we see is what is left!) Otherwise an excellent read.

Excellent
very interesting book that sheds light on a little known area. Done with humour and a real knowledge of the subject