The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle

by Sara Wheeler

Hardcover, 2011

Call number

910.911 WHE

Collection

Publication

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011), Edition: Reprint, 336 pages

Description

Ten years after her bestselling book on the Antarctic, "Terra Incognita," Wheeler journeys to the opposite pole to take the measure of what is at once the most pristine place on Earth and the locus of global warming.

Media reviews

"At times Wheeler’s chronicle seems hobbled by a knitting together of accounts of many short trips made over several years; perhaps more time in the field and less in the library might have made for a silkier narrative. And occasionally it’s difficult to discern one set of shaggy scientists,
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heads cranked toward the permafrost, from the next. But these are quibbles: by and large, Wheeler’s sense of place, science, self and story is exceptional. "
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1 more
"What is the Arctic?" is a question Sara Wheeler sets out to answer. It's important we update our imaginations, and set aside the igloos, because whatever the Arctic is, "everyone wants what the Arctic has": land, oil and minerals...Though hasty in style, Wheeler's book teaches a lot about what is
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happening in the far north, which is valuable if, as she says, "the survival of civilisation as we know it hangs on what happens in the Arctic". Whether or not one wants such "civilisation" to survive is a moot point, given what this book discloses about its greed and its effects.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member vguy
Wonderful grab bag. More like a set of essays held together by the arctic theme than a coherent tome, it includes intrepid heroes dying young, lit crit of scarcely known authors, a critique of Stalinist and the gulag, Mussolini v. Nansen, the science of global warming and how the arctic is a magnet
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for pollution, meeting a polar bear when you can't handle a weapon and so on and on- all held together by Wheeler's wide reading, sharp intelligence and sense of both fun and tragedy. Most moving is the collapse of indigenous cultures; most disturbing the arrival of the big extraction industries.

i learned, amid much else, that "Greenhouse Effect" is a (slight) misnomer: greenhouses work by convected heat, the planet's problem is radiant heat. And that Sir John Franklin was a hen-pecked ass.
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LibraryThing member debnance
The Magnetic North by Sara Wheeler

Wheeler takes her readers places no one has been, places no one really wants to go except via books. This time, she guides us through the frozen north, the lands and waters north of the Arctic Circle. She's an ideal guide, one who seeks out all the coolest (in both
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senses of the word) spots and who finds all the best of the Arctic stories, and relates her tales with a delightfully literate vocabulary.
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Awards

Pages

336

ISBN

0374200130 / 9780374200138
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