MAGNETIC NORTH

A Globe and Mail Finest Books of the 12 months 2011 Title

Greater than a decade in the past, Sara Wheeler traveled to Antarctica to grasp a continent practically misplaced to fantasy and lore. Within the extensively acclaimed, bestselling Terra Incognita, she chronicled her quest to discover a hidden historical past buried in Antarctica’s excessive environment. Now, Wheeler journeys to the other pole to create a definitive image of life on the fringes. In The Magnetic North, she takes full measure of the Arctic: directly probably the most pristine place on earth and the locus of world warming.

Impressed by the spiraling form of a reindeer-horn bangle, she travels counterclockwise across the North Pole by way of the territories belonging to Russia, the US, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, marking the transformations of what as soon as appeared an unchangeable panorama. As she witnesses the mounting air pollution concentrated on the pole, Wheeler reckons with the sickness of the entire organism of the earth.

Smashing by way of the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, shadowing the countless Trans-Alaska Pipeline with a tricky Idaho-born outdoorswoman, herding reindeer with the Lapps, and visiting the haunting, deceptively peaceable lands of the Gulag, Wheeler brings the Arctic’s many contradictions to life. The Magnetic North is an pressing, lovely guide, wealthy in dramatic description and vivid reporting. It’s a singular, deeply private portrait of a area rising every day in world significance.