Product Description
241 photographs, 50 in color, a valuable general survey of Iceland. The different aspects of the life of the country and its people. ... Read more

Book Description
This book contains over sixty papers presented at the congress, which was the first international congress on the history of the arctic and sub-arctic region. The papers are by scholars from eleven countries and deal with a wide variety of subjects relating to the history of the entire arctic and sub-arctic region. ... Read more

Product Description
A boxed set of 6 wonderful books, great for learning goegraphy and history. The stamps included will help that tactile learner. Fantastic photography! ... Read more

Book Description
Across Greenland on Skis - an intriguing account of the first successful crossing of Greenland. Though it's been noted that Peary wanted to be the first to cross Greenland, Nansen beat him to it.

As early as 1882, Nansen began to consider plans for a journey across Greenland, the world's largest island. The interior of this barren land had remained completely unexplored, and in scientific circles of the time the most diversified and remarkable theories were held on conditions there. Nansen was keen to ascertain for himself what the country was like and felt that skis were the most suitable means of progression in these inhospitable regions - the aeroplane was, of course, still many years in the future. He had made a public announcement of his intentions in 1887, and in 1888, together with five companions, he put his plan to the test - and triumphed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Skiing Across Greenland
Fridthof Nansen in this book did more to bring skiing to the larger world than any other individual. Until his Greenland crossing on skis, few outside of Norway, or Scandinavia at the most, had heard of skiing, although of course it had existed there for centuries. The early chapter of the book on skis and "skilobing" (skiing) is a marvelous account of the sport, and particularly of Sondre Norheim and the Telemarkers who revolutionized it as recreation.
Nansen writes the book in what can only be called a charming tone. He makes the crossing of the icecap seem easy, and indeed, most of the harrowing detail of the expedition relates to the efforts of the party after being dropped off at sea on the east coast of Greenland, through the ice floes with great difficulty, to an eventual landing and a hard climb up to the central ice plateau. There is also considerable detail given about the way of life of the Eskimo and Danish inhabitants of the Greenland west coast, where Nansen and his party overwintered after the crossing.
A classic of "cold exploration" and a lively style and good read after more than a century. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (9)

The Far Traveler
This book enlightens a period of history not well known to date. It is very interesting reading, especially for anyone with Scandinavian roots. The research the lies behing this work is remarkable. I highly recommend this book.

The real hero isn't Gudrun, it's modern archaeology
Brown gives us a lot of interesting information about Gudrun's life and times in "The Far Traveller."But what is even more interesting is her description of being on archaeological digs in Iceland, describing what archaeologists have to do to torture more information out of the physical remains of the past.Brown's focus on what archaeology has contributed to our knowledge of the Vikings, as well as archaeology's limitations, make this a more fascinating read than the account of what we think we know about Gudrun could have done.

Fascinating, solid
I am just a general reader who happens to enjoy well-written history.I've never read much at all about the Vikings but the NY Times review of THE FAR TRAVELER was enticing and I was not let down by its promise.Nancy Marie Brown has reached back to a place and people obscured by time, doing a decent job of erasing some of the fog and cold desolation that obscure the Dark Ages and Medieval Epoch in Iceland and Greenland.She also succeeds in revealing a lot about contemporary archaeological practice and thought.

Brown turns first to the Sagas, the 10th and 11th century tales of Vikings, for inspiration.Though embroidered, the Sagas, written down some generations later, are regarded as holding historical memories.Brown focuses on one woman who appears in both the Eirik the Red and Greenland Sagas as her guide, Gudrid, who traveled from Iceland to Greenland to Vinland, back to Iceland and remarkably, in later age, on a pilgrimage to Rome.Her son Snorri was very likely the first European child born on North American soil, circa 1005.Her personal story reveals much about religion, economics, gender relations, values, world view and other aspects of her culture. Born late in the 10th century AD, she witnessed the spread of Christianity and the fading of the violent marauding male economy as the domestic textile industry spun by women on the farm began to reposition Iceland in the world trade scene.Brown travels to all of the places Gudrid did, reads scholarship on her topic and participates in archaeological digs and recreation of weaving studios.

The digs at L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland, have been reported on before, but Brown brings a fresh fascination to them in the context of Gudrid's life.She provides strong descriptive passages of the places she visits and there is one map in the front of the book.It would have been nice, however, to have had some illustrations.I would also like to have known a little more about Brown's own context and interest in this subject.

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman
I found the book, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman fascinating. The author has certainly done her home work about the Icelandic Sagas. I have met some of the people in the book when I traveled to Iceland in 2000 and 2005. I had studied the Sagas and leaned about Gudrid and her adventurous life. Thanks Nancy Marie.

Terrific book on viking women for all women
I'm writing a historical novel about a Viking woman and this book was a terrific, sensory filled look into that time.But I'd recommend this book to anyone interested into history, into historical-scientific adventures...really wonderful read! C Bock ... Read more

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
From the acclaimed chronicler of open spaces, Gretel Ehrlich, comes a stunning and lyrical evocation of a practically unknown place and people. Beginning in 1993, Ehrlich traveled to Greenland, the northernmost country in the world, in every season--the four months of perpetual dark (in which the average temperature is 25 degrees below zero), the four months of constant daylight, and the twilight seasons in between--traveling up the west coast, often by dogsled, and befriending the resilient and generous Inuits along the way. Greenland, unlike its name, is 95 percent ice--a landscape of deep rock-walled fjords, glaciers, narwhal whales swimming among icebergs the size of football fields, walruses busting through oceans of shifting ice. In the far north, the polar Inuit--the "real heroes"--still dress in bear and seal skins, and hunt walrus, polar bears, and whales with harpoons. The only constant is weather and the perilous movements of ice, the only transport is dogsled, and the closest village may be a month and a half-long dogsled journey away. The people share an austere and harsh life, lightened with humor and the fantastic stories of Sila, the god of weather, Nerrivik, the goddess of waters, of humans transforming themselves into animals, and interspecies marriages. Interwoven with Ehrlich's journey is the even more remarkable story of Knud Rasmussen, the founder of Eskimology, an Inuit-Danish explorer and ethnographer who took some of the most hazardous and brilliant expeditions ever, including a three and a half-year, 20,000-mile adventure by dogsled across the polar north to Alaska. Like Rasmussen, Ehrlich learns that the landscape of Greenland is "less a description of desolation than an ode to the beauty of impermanence."Alternately mind-expanding, gripping, and dreamlike, This Cold Heaven is a revelation. --Lesley ReedBook Description

For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the men and women who long for and love the complex frailties and treacherous beauty of a world defined by ice.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, 840,000 square miles in extent, is covered by the largest continental ice sheet in the world.

Only the rocky fringe of its coast is habitable. There, the Inuit, the Arctic’s first explorers, have survived and thrived in the harshest of climates. For the Inuit, an ice-age, ice-adapted people who first traveled from Siberia across the polar North six thousand years ago, weather is consciousness. In a world composed of ice and darkness, water and light, where skins of dog, seal, bear, even hare and eider duck, are sewn into clothes, tents, and sleeping bags as protection, where transport is by dogsled and kayak, the only rein for the uncontrollable force of weather is an unbending self-discipline. The blend of physical endurance and psychological perseverance required for daily existence first drew Ehrlich to this terrain.

Her guide, her inspiration, her companion in spirit was the great Danish-Inuit explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen. Between 1902 and his death in 1933 he launched seven expeditions: to record the unknown history and customs of the nomadic Eskimos; to chronicle the skills, beliefs,and crafts that made life in this climate possible and a matter of grace. For Rasmussen, “all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes.” As she followed his trail, Ehrlich was to find the things that can open the mind to what is hidden from others. This Cold Heaven is at once a distillation of her many journeys, a path into a world divided into darkness and light and, finally, an attempt to capture the clarity that blinds us with surprise. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

This Cold Heaven
I have enjoyed Ehrlich's writing style, very poetic descriptions about the ice and the people. She switches back and forth between her own experiences and historical expeditions, and the contrasts are interesting.

Eskimos as people, Greenland as a real place.
This amazing book opened my eyes to the Inuit culture and homeland in a most unexpected way. I really bought it hoping to learn something about Inuit kayak hunters, but that aspect of Inuit hunting life is not heavily covered in the book. Instead, the author takes us on many wonderful journeys by dogsled and gives the reader a most fascinating viewpoint - right behind the dogs. We experience the hard but thrilling life of the skilled Arctic hunter as described by an articulate passenger in the sled, and in that way we come to know the people of the north country in a most sympathetic way.

I recommend this book to anyone who loves beautifully written adventures. They are here.

Is there there there?
Not being a fan of travel books, my comments may be biased. Years ago when I wandered the globe, my desire was to live as a part of the places in which I found myself.I made a terrible tourist.I mostly wanted to go where I could speak the language of the natives and getting a letter home took weeks. The world isn't like that any more, nor maybe has it so been for a while for tourists and travel writers.The four books by Gretel Ehrlich I have read run the gauntlet."This Cold Heaven", tells of her visits to Greenland between 1995 and 2001. It best conveys a feel of what life is like for, maybe the last generation of, Inuit hunters who use dogsleds.And out on the sled is where Ms Ehrlich most wants to be.It is a beautiful book interspersed with Rasmussen's, diaries and descriptions of his life in the north.The reader gets a sense of how the Inuit world is put together, its roots, some differences between various groups and the challenges it faces, at the edge of the internet age.The greatest changes, to a relatively remote First Nation in Canada I am familiar with, were brought about by television. A kind of passivity set in: no more making music and living by one's body became less central.When dogsled, hunting Greenlanders tell Ehrlich that they just want to give their children the experience of the hunt and that the children will decide in their turn whether they will live that way, I sense she is documenting the last of the dogsled hunts.In my First Nation, the elder who last used dogs is now too old, so four wheelers and snow mobiles are a way of life.

What I lose patience with in Ehrlich's writing is most manifest in her book,"Questions of Heaven." She goes toChina in search of Buddhism during the early stages of "getting rich is good."I don't quite understand her purpose except relating the difficulties of travel, telling anecdotes about some Chinese and their experiences from "let a thousand flowers bloom" to the cultural revolution, and her frustrated search. She goes to decayed monasteries which are just beginning to be opened to tourists. She is overwhelmed by the density, filth, poverty, pollution, etc. of China. Had she done some homework, all this wouldn't be such a revelation. In the Tibetan areas, she mentions the existence of Tibetan speaking westerners but does not explore who they are and why they are there even though she says she practices Tibetan Buddhism.The most interesting partof the book are her descriptions of the old man who was tortured during the cultural revolution and survived to resurrect traditional forms of music with a rag tag bunch of people from his valley. She doesn't explain why where he lives is more prosperous and happy than other places she visits.

What I find difficult in many nature/travel writers she pours on in this book. Flowery language describing clouds, hills and landscape doesn't do much for me.I have spent much time out of doors.I could wax poetic about the blood red bark of an old manzanita in contrast to the peeling orange brown of a madrone, or the stages of a slime mold or a clown nudibranch grazing urchins. The silence of the redwoods, desiccated by summer dryness just before the coming rains, filled my yesterday's walk.No signs of animal life but a few dragonflies and a fleeting flock of bushtits.A few days earlier I had used "dead" to describe it to a walking companion, and she was a bit offended. A precontact California Indian would have known what I meant.Ehrlich evens makes mention of it during her recovery in California related in book four.But it takes more than poetic adjectives to convey a scene in nature.Reading lengthy passages of romantic descriptions of nature becomes tedious. I want to know why Ehrlich travels and writes, how the places she goes are assembled, the role landscape plays, their history, their challenges, the differences among their inhabitants, etc. If her book is the journey of an American Buddhist, there is very little critical relating to Buddhism except that either nobody she meets practices meditation, even chanting, or she doesn't inquire about it.

The other two books, "Solace of Open Space," and "A Match to the Heart," fall somewhere in between.The former is good in the beginning, particularly in the descriptions of sheep herding, but becomes spotty after her marriage and life ranching. Ehrlich has really lived in Wyoming.She earned her spurs. But it would be great to know more about the strong, silent herders and ranchers: who are they; what is their inner landscape like;what are the tensions and rewards of working as they do? How does machinery effect their lives?During my brief stint as a cowboy, besides pushing cows between gigantic pastures, and sorting out the non-pregnant ones, I spent days building fences and hours in a four wheel drive pickup bouncing off-road.The chapters on the rodeo and Sun Dance give us far too little information on what these institutions are really like and what makes them tick.Ehrlich is also a tease when it comes to her personal life.We learn of the tragic death of her boyfriend which leads to her to stay in Wyoming, but the stuff of her one affair and her marriage are only hinted at.She is a beautiful woman in cowboy country. There has got to be more to it.

In the last of the foursome, "A Match to the Heart," she is truck by lightening and relates her torturous recovery.It is a touching book.I have a lot of empathy with her struggle.Her descriptions of the deep humanity of her cardiologist are beautiful.But the book also leaves me a bit unsatisfied.The husband who doesn't seem to care, her trip to London, which seemed so inappropriate given her physical condition, the people with whom she connects but also seems distant from---I want to know more about her inner processes, her meditation practice."A Match to the Heart" has aspects of a travel book, a chapter about being on a boat in the Alaska Panhandle without any sense of why she is there: a paying tourist; a guest of scientists or friends? When Ehrlich is on the way to recovery she lays out a map of the world pondering where next.It is hard to fathom, that she runs off from her Wyoming ranch to far distant travels and undertakes similar jaunts during her absences from Greenland.When she casually mentions these, the style of life implicit in so bouncing around the world seems inconsistent with the sense of place she is trying to convey.I am deeply attracted to what she has to say when she really inhabits the places in which she spends, as they say, quality time.I guess I want more of that from her.
Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

Heaven On Earth?
In "This Cold Heaven", Gretel Ehrlich extolls the life of the subsistence hunters of Greenland. Her writing is really very nice and brought this remote place to life for me. Jared Diamond's "Collapse" gave us the picture of the european Greenlanders and now Ehrlich gives us the picture from the 'other side of the hill.'

The beauty of the environment and the struggle for sanity in the long dark made very interesting reading, having spent 20 winters in Minnesota where it is dark a mere 16 hours a day.

I'm not sure she takes her observations to their logical conclusion, however. The life she admires is that of the subsistence hunter. What makes it admirable for her is the totality of it, the self-sufficiency, the purity. But that life evolved out of necessity, which has been overtaken by modern life. Most Greenlanders live off the supply ships; only a handful hunt for a living. These few are restrictive in their practices, using rifles but eschewing outboard motors and snow mobiles, for example.

In other words they are playing an elaborate game of 'survival.' They could make it easier for themselves but they don't because it makes it more of a challenge. The fact is, there is no obvious reason for people to go around in dogsleds hunting walrus. They could be educating themselves for the future instead of clinging to an outmoded past.

I think she understands this. I say that because of the incident of the polar bear, where she urged that it not be killed. She accompanied the hunters by dogsled to polar bear country for the specific purpose of getting a bear. Then when it came time to pull the trigger she wanted the men to let it go.

In that moment she understood that synthetics are just as good as bear skin for keeping warm. Food can be gotten from the shelves thanks to the supply ships. Transportation to any place in the world is available. There is no longer any need to shoot polar bears in order to survive, and she knew it.

There is honor and purity in modernity, too. We meet Fred, who has been forecasting the weather at Thule for 27 years. I'm a forecaster, too. I can relate to Fred, and I understand why he has stayed there all this time. While his duties benefit the well-being of everyone on that base, he has undertaken a wider quest, that of comprehending nature and humanity in his specific setting. It is similar to that of the hunter, in that it is also an internal quest which reveals oneself.

Only Fred really knows why is there. Only Jens and Mikele really know why they go out on the ice to hunt. Fred could retire to Punta Gorda. Jens could go to Copenhagen and relax. Gretel slides past this whole matter. But then, her eyes were bothering her.

WONDERFUL BOOK
I really enjoyed this book, Gretel takes you with her in her travels and experiences to one of the most starkley beautiful places in the world.
great book to read in the heat of summer.
wonderful tales, wonderful author.
I could feel the ice, well reading this book.

great insightful book.....
one you will want to have on your shelves for ever. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Covers the basics about Surtsey
This book was aimed to be read by a younger audience (kids ages 7-14). It covers information about formation of the island and the colonization of the island in a simple written manner. I also like the way it divides the book into 11 chapters and adds something about the poetic Edda at the start of each chapter to relay how mythology interplays with realistic events like the formation of such an island. But as an adult reader, I still had more questions after I finished the book.

The book does not go in depth about the geological nature of the island. Yes, the island was formed from a volcanic eruption, but what is the nature and quality of the land? Will it be settled by Man as it has been by birds and plant-life? What is the future of such an island? (The book implies at the end that it will be destroyed, but does not tell the reader the specifics of how/when/why). I was looking to answer such questions more in depth about this new island.

The stength of this book lies in its remarkable pictures. If only you could get some of these astonishing pictures as a poster and hang them up on your walls...You would stare at them in awe for hours!

As far as buying it...it would be worth your money if you have kids who like volcanos or like to read because they would be able to appreciate it more. If not, it would be worth getting it to read at a public library or a used book. I would not spend too much money obtaining it. ... Read more

Product Description
The eighteen articles in this book focus on and critically explore several manifestations of the ways in which places assume historical and cultural meaning. Many places we get to know come to us (and we to them) loaded with historical significance, but the ideological and aesthetic construction of the past in relation to the present also often involves concentration on certain places, be they local, native, or foreign. Such places and they can be anything from a city square to a piece of wilderness to a whole country are constantly reconstructed by cultural reiterations, renovations or contestations. Places are among the keys to our cultural identities, but this means they are also gateways of the imaginary. The authors scholars from Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Iceland, and Britain demonstrate and discuss how important ideas are grounded on physical sites, be they circumscribed by national interests, urban encounters, historical figures, traumatic events, or mythic notions of landscape. A number of articles dwell on Iceland as a place of the utopian imaginary, as fleshed out for instance by William Morris. ... Read more