Greenland Books

Iceland: Land of the Sagas

Jon Krakauer, David Roberts

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Subjects -> History -> Europe -> Iceland

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"We raised our fists and cheered. . . . With the sagas in our heads, with Iceland at its wildest beneath our boots, it would not have been impossible to see Bárdr clumping along the summit ridge, prodding the glacier with his staff, ready to show us the way down."

Iceland is a pictorial classic on one of the last "undiscovered" countries in Europe--reissued for the first time in paperback.
        Iceland is often thought to be covered by ice, but in fact it is gloriously green. Lush meadows, wildflower fields, and miles of rich tundra cover a landscape of remarkable variety: deep lakes, bubbling hot springs, tumbling waterfalls, snow-capped mountains. It's also a landscape amazingly alive with massive lava flows and enormous glaciers. The human story of Iceland goes back more than eleven thousand years, and its heritage is told here in a treasury of riveting sagas of real-life heroes and all manner of supernatural beings.
        Both the land and the people of one of Europe's most gorgeous countries come to life in this colorful account of the authors' adventures as they walk, climb, and photograph their way through Iceland and connect to the bone-chilling sagas and the unfamiliar terrain. With breathtaking photographs from critically acclaimed writer and journalist Jon Krakauer, author of the international bestsellers Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, and a penetrating narrative from Outside contributing editor and travel writer David Roberts, Iceland splendidly captures the spirit of this enigmatic country.
        Circumnavigating Iceland in summer and winter, Krakauer and Roberts encounter tales of monks and Vikings, outlaws and adventurers, trolls and witches. While touring and photographing, they discover the myths and legends of Iceland's stirring history. Numerous other feats--including a hazardous winter climb to the summit of one of Iceland's tallest mountains--round out a fascinating introduction to this unique and beautiful land.

The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future

Richard B. Alley

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Princeton University Press Amazon Marketplace: 48 new & used starting at $9.61

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Subjects -> Outdoors & Nature -> Environment -> Weather
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Earth Sciences -> General

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Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Richard Alley, one of the world's leading climate researchers, tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. In the 1990s he and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. Here Alley offers the first popular account of the wildly fluctuating climate that characterized most of prehistory--long deep freezes alternating briefly with mild conditions--and explains that we humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate. But, he warns, our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years.

The Two-Mile Time Machine begins with the story behind the extensive research in Greenland in the early 1990s, when scientists were beginning to discover ancient ice as an archive of critical information about the climate. Drilling down two miles into the ice, they found atmospheric chemicals and dust that enabled them to construct a record of such phenomena as wind patterns and precipitation over the past 110,000 years. The record suggests that "switches" as well as "dials" control the earth's climate, affecting, for example, hot ocean currents that today enable roses to grow in Europe farther north than polar bears grow in Canada. Throughout most of history, these currents switched on and off repeatedly (due partly to collapsing ice sheets), throwing much of the world from hot to icy and back again in as little as a few years.

Alley explains the discovery process in terms the general reader can understand, while laying out the issues that require further study: What are the mechanisms that turn these dials and flip these switches? Is the earth due for another drastic change, one that will reconfigure coastlines or send certain regions into severe drought? Will global warming combine with natural variations in Earth's orbit to flip the North Atlantic switch again? Predicting the long-term climate is one of the greatest challenges facing scientists in the twenty-first century, and Alley tells us what we need to know in order to understand and perhaps overcome climate changes in the future.

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman

Nancy Marie Brown

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid’s story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman’s last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid’s steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned—and expanded—the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse.

Ultima Thule: Explorers and Natives in the Polar North

Jean Malaurie, Willard Wood, Anthony Roberts

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Perfect book 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is the ultimate book on Greenland with a sensitive approach to the inuit people. Both breathtaking and informative. Respect of nature, art and people. A masterpiece.

Editorial Review:

Based on excerpts from the explorers' logs counterbalanced by Inuit testimony, this text is the story of European and American exploration in the polar north. It aims to bring to life both sides of the clash that arose when white men arrived in the Far North, dreaming of conquest and believing that they brought with them a civilization superior to that of the indigenous peoples. Today, the outlook for the Inuit and the polar environment is bleak: the people and their landscape are in danger of disappearing for good. But according to Jean Malaurie, who spent a year living among the Inuit, the situation is not altogether without hope. It is illustrated with period photographs, engravings, artefacts and drawings.

Two Against the Ice: A Classic Arctic Survival Story and a Remarkable Account of Companionship in the Face of Adversity

Ejnar Mikkelsen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

TWO AGAINST THE ICE is a classic tale of survival by an unheralded but important figure in the history of Arctic exploration. First published in Danish in 1955, it has never before been published in North America.

Ejnar Mikkelsen was a man devoted to Arctic exploration. In 1910 he decided to search for the diaries of the ill-fated Mylius-Erichsen expedition, which had set out to prove that Robert Peary’s outline of the East Greenland coast was a myth, erroneous and presumably self-serving. Iver Iversen was a mechanic who joined Mikkelsen in Iceland when the expedition’s boat needed repair. Several months later, Mikkelsen and Iversen embarked on a journey during which they would suffer virtually every travail in the Arctic repertoire: implacable cold, scurvy, starvation, frostbite, snow blindness, plunges into icy seawater, Sisyphean sledging conditions, Vitamin A poisoning, debilitated dogs, apocalyptic storms, gaping crevasses, and assorted mortifications of the flesh. Mikkelsen’s diary was eaten by a bear. Three years of this, coupled with seemingly no hope of rescue, would drive most crazy, yet the two retained both their sanity and their humor. Indeed, what may have saved them was their refusal to become as desolate as their surroundings.

“A classic of Arctic survival and a remarkable account of companionship in the face of adversity. ” -- From The Foreword

The Shetland Bus: A WWII Epic of Escape, Survival, and Adventure

David Howarth

List Price: $14.95 By: The Lyons Press Amazon Marketplace: 44 new & used starting at $0.82

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

But He Wasn'there! 4 out of 5 stars.
11 of 12 people found this review helpful.

The Shetland Bus" is the story of the British/Norwegian operation to run supplies, ammunition, weapons and secret agents from the Shetland Islands to Norway during WW2. Rescued refugees took the return trip. These efforts were key to the Norwegian resistance to the German occupation, which tied down 10 divisions and 280,000 enemy troops.
Author Howarth was well placed to write SB. He was the number 2 British Naval man in the Shetlands and had a key hand in each mission. He was obviously as close to his men as a good commander can be and writes touchingly, respectfully and personally about his charges. We learn of close escapes from the treacherous weather, quislings and the persistent, if over stretched, German authorities. If his men were in trouble, they could -and did- die in minutes in the icy North Sea, far from shore or any hope of rescue. The author lends the reader an appreciation for the sheer logistical strains behind the Shetland Bus. Balancing people, personalities, supplies, and technical details was a demanding job- one, which the author plainly relished. He was a talented writer, producing 18 historical works, several of which are available on amazon.com.
The weak side to SB is that Howarth was shoreside throughout the war. The action here is all second hand and the telling suffers. Howarth simply wasn't there. He was hundreds of miles from the action. Since this book first appeared in 1951, one gets the distinct impression that, so close to the War's end, some censorship of classified information may have been imposed. Something or someone may have held Howarth back. SB is hard to rate. Out of respect for the author, his obvious writing talent and his men: 4 stars. Amazon.com fans may wish to scroll through Howarth's (apparently) better-received WW2 efforts; "Sledge Patrol" or especially "We Die Alone". I'll end on a positive note: Here is one military book with decent maps! Hooray!

Editorial Review:

From the author of We Die Alone.

People of the Polar North

Knud J. Rasmussen

List Price: $81.95 By: AMS Press Amazon Marketplace: 3 new & used starting at $34.95

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The Sledge Patrol: A WWII Epic of Escape, Survival, and Victory

David Howarth

List Price: $14.95 By: The Lyons Press Amazon Marketplace: 33 new & used starting at $1.30

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In 1943, a group of brave Danish and Norwegian hunters carried out one of the most dramatic operations of World War II. Using dogsleds to patrol a stark 500-mile stretch of the Greenland coast, their wartime mission was to guard against Nazi interlopers - an unlikely scenario given the cruel climate. But one day, a footprint was spotted on desolate Sabine Island, along with other obvious signs of the enemy. Not expecting to find the trouble they did, the three Sledge Patrol members escaped to the nearest hunting hut only to have the Germans pursue on foot. In the dead of the Arctic night, the men escaped capture at the last instant and, without their coats or sled dogs, walked fifty-six miles to get back to base.

While the Sledge Patrol had only hunting rifles, resilience, and their knowledge of outdoor survival, the Germans were armed with machine guns and grenades and greatly outnumbered them. David Howarth skillfully relates the tensely exciting true tale of how the men of the Sledge Patrol fought capture or death in desolation by outwitting and outlasting the enemy. This is a saga of human skill, faith, and endurance - and one of the most remarkable Allied victories ever recorded.

A Visit to Iceland

Ida Pfeiffer

Amazon Price: $11.66 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Boomer Books Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $9.55

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Subjects -> History -> World -> Medieval

Editorial Review:

Informative 1852 travelogue by an adventurous and interesting woman. This publication from Boomer Books is specially designed and typeset for comfortable reading.

Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883-1884: Journals and Letters

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Editorial Review:

In the summer of 1883, Franz Boas, widely regarded as one of the fathers of Inuit anthropology, sailed from Germany to Baffin Island to spend a year among the Inuit of Cumberland Sound. This was his introduction to the Arctic and to anthropological fieldwork. This book presents, for the first time, his letters and journal entries from the year that he spent among the Inuit, providing not only an insightful background to his numerous scientific articles about Inuit culture, but a comprehensive and engaging narrative as well.

Using a Scottish whaling station as his base, Boas travelled widely with the Inuit, learning their language, living in their tents and snow houses, sharing their food, and experiencing their joys and sorrows. At the same time he was taking detailed notes and surveying and mapping the landscape and coastline. Ludger M¦ller-Wille has transcribed his journals and his letters to his parents and fiancTe and woven these texts into a sequential narrative. The result is a fascinating study of one of the earliest and most successful examples of participatory observation among the Inuit. Originally published in German in 1994, the text has been translated into English by William Barr, who has also published translations of other important works on the history of the Arctic.

Illustrated with some of Boas's own photos and with maps of his field area, Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883-1884 is a valuable addition to the historical and anthropological literature on southern Baffin Island.