The Magnetic North offers a fascinating tour of a disappearing world. Sara Wheeler is an eloquent and intrepid guide.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe
“A wise, provoking and zestful chronicle, poetic, often tragic and always engaging. Wheeler, a prolific raconteur of distant places, has created the finest book on the Arctic since Hugh Brody's The Other Side of Eden . . . She has mapped a remarkable journey.” —Rory MacLean, The Sunday Times (London)
“The Magnetic North proved irresistibly attractive. I loved . . . Terra Incognita, and this was an equally coddling hoosh of personal travelogue, historical anecdotage and speculative thinking—all the better because Wheeler began her series of Arctic travels, if not a climate change sceptic, then unconvinced about its anthropic cause, and ended up unable to deny the meltwater on the ground.” —Will Self, New Statesman
“A book that deserves to stand alongside Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez's classic account of life above the tree line. Indeed, more than once I made the comparison in Wheeler's favour. She's funnier, and her writing, while brilliantly evocative, is never overblown.” —Erica Wagner, The Times (London)
“Fantastic . . . Readers are whisked away on an incredible, multifaceted tour of a region still unknown . . . This fact-filled narrative is nearly impossible to put down . . . By chronicling what the Arctic tells us about our past, Wheeler vividly reveals what it tells us about our collective future.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“With wry humor and extensive research, Wheeler captures a swiftly transforming region with which we all have a symbiotic relationship . . . Wheeler's sense of place, science, self and story is exceptional.” —Holly Morris, The New York Times Book Review
Deploying an inquisitive mind and a crisp, witty prose style, Wheeler takes the reader on an informative and ultimately tragic tour of a region in the throes of drastic change…Wherever she goes, Wheeler exhibits a knack for summing up people, places and things memorably.
—The Washington Post
Whether she's on migration with the Sami reindeer herders, interviewing scientists on the Greenland ice sheet or white-knuckling it on the highway that runs along the Alaskan pipeline, she aims for the sweet, deep spot, "to see," as Wheeler says, quoting T. S. Eliot, "beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory"—an ambition this region too infrequently receives, but sorely deserves, from a documentarian…Wheeler doesn't trade in sentiment or noble savagery…With wry humor and extensive research, Wheeler captures a swiftly transforming region with which we all have a symbiotic relationship.
—The New York Times
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 Sámi 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. (Feb.)
Some people can't stay away from cold places. Wheeler here recounts her travels to the Arctic Circle, the polar opposite of the Antarctic trek recorded in her best-selling Terra Incognita. The Arctic Circle crops Canada, Alaska, regions of Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland, and assorted islands. It is an area of fragile life, where native peoples survived in close balance with the land long before the disruption of shoe-eating explorers, missionaries, the Gulag, and geologists. The Arctic has been a last frontier, land of mythmaking, and victim of greed for the gas, oil, diamonds, and gold of the land and the blubber beneath the shrinking ice. Wheeler visits scientists doggedly studying the history of the ice and the impact of climate change and describes the isolation and beauty of their barren open laboratories. Remains of human travel and habitation, the imposition of nationhood, and the degradation of the landscape as well as less visible radioactive and chemical contamination all affect this landscape. VERDICT An eloquent, important book. Recommended for all readers. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/10.]—Melissa Stearns, Franklin Pierce Univ., Rindge, NH
An engrossing account of the people and cultures living—if not thriving—in high polar regions.
In Terra Incognita (1998), Wheeler (Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton, 2007, etc.) chronicled her tour of Earth's opposite end, Antarctica, but that was a vacant continent surrounded by an ocean. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by continents with five populous nations bordering its coast: the United States, Canada, Russia, Denmark and Norway. All are showing increasing interest in their long-suffering northern inhabitants and competing to prove that their continental shelves—and the resulting mineral rights—extend to the Pole. The author begins in far northeastern Russia, a backwater even in Soviet times where nomadic reindeer herders were devastated by Stalin's collectivization and further impoverished by the Soviet Union's collapse. In a theme that recurs throughout Wheeler's travels, the inhabitants yearn for more government attention (if only subsidies) but also more independence and more development. After a drive up the long highway parallel to the Alaska pipeline to visit the North Slope and scientists studying the area, the author moves on to North Canada, Greenland, Norway and northwest Russia. Living and sharing the discomfort of visiting researchers, Wheeler describes the dazzling environment, the frequently horrendous history of exploration and the struggles and depredations of emigrants from lower latitudes who today usually form the majority. She also delivers an unsentimental account of the indigenous people, whose life before the arrival of whites was often short and brutal.
A vivid, sympathetic portrait of what are essentially frontier regions where existence remains perilous and the major changes of global warming may or may not improve matters.
