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'.

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.

Reviews

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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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 Sami 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.