An excellent book for anyone interested in the Norse explorations of the North Atlantic: Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland. Jones not only gives a good history, still relevant despite the 1964 copyright, but gives the latter half of the book over to English translations of the original sources: The Book of the Icelanders, The Book of the Settlements, The Greenlanders' Saga, Eirik the Red's Saga, Karlsefni's Voyage to Vinland, and The Story of Einar Sokkason.

I just heard this book's author on the radio, and was so impressed by him. He's a Harvard professor who got interested in the story of Matthew Henson, a black man who explored the Arctic and discovered the North Pole along with Robert Peary. The professor, Dr. Counter, has gone to the Arctic several times now, and has befriended the sons and grandsons of both Henson and Peary. Before Dr. Counter, nobody in the US even knew that these explorers had fathered children up there. And Dr. Counter has done a lot to get Henson recognition here in the States, where institutionalized racism has minimized his role in history.

Northern Latitudes showcases the prose poetry of travel writer Lawrence Millman who writings evoke the people and landscapes of the far northern climes of Canada, Greenland, Labrador, Iceland, and the northern reaches of the British Isles.

The Last Angakok (Angmagssalik, Greenland, 1984): Bedridden he is, this bundle of age, who once could fly merely by flexing his index fingers. Songless he is, this man of songs, who once could chant away avalanches and piterag winds with the great guttural of his voice. And full of sickness he is, this healer, who once could cure everything from rheumatism to possession by unfriendly spirits. Now there's no one left to cure him, and so his sleeping skins mark the compass points of his universe. Yet his eye, slitted half moons, remain bright: they still inhabit a numinous realm. Flying is easy, they say it's the not flying that's hard.

This book is perfect for a geologist studying Iceland. It has hard to find data tables, and the authour has aflair for making radiocarbon dating easy to read. A must!

This book is full of interesting information about the customs and traditions of all the different Eskimo tribes. The bulk of the book is a compilation of stories collected from the oral traditions of the Eskimos. It is clear and well-written. I recommend this book to anyone interested in these native peoples.

Great Book! Written by the explorer himself, the story comes 'straight from the horse's mouth' telling of the his expedition to Greenland in the early 1900's. Seeing inside the lives of Mikkelsen and his companion, Iversen during this expedition makes me wonder if anyone today in our soft, comfortable life could ever endure what they did. Their outlook and physical stamina during their hardship makes my 'discomforts' look like peanuts!

This is the best series of guide books. There are not many complete guides to Icleand. I studied this book before I went on my vacation to Icleand. After reading in the "places to see" section I chose exactly what I wanted to see in Iceland. It just so happens this book led me to take a 10 hour tour in Iceland that is not the most popular tour--it ended up being the best part of my trip. If you go to Iceland, take the South Shore tour and visit the black sand beach and smaller waterfalls--not just the Golden Circle. You can read all about the sights in this book. The restaurant guide is very helpful. I give it 4 stars because some of the information is outdated. For example there are lockers at the Blue Lagoon. And the book should tell tourists how the entrance to the thermal pools works--this is important, esp for non-European travellers.

This was a gift from my mother-in-law, she purchased the book before we went to Iceland. The book was only fair in explaining the culture and history, but as a travel guide it does very nicely. We keep this book in our car and use it to find our way around in Iceland. If you are wanting a book that explains the culture I would suggest Iceland: The Land of Sagas--But if you want a book that will help you with your trip to Iceland this is the book to purchase.

What a wonderful survey of Iceland! This 378-page book is printed on heavy, slick paper, unlike the usual travel-book newsprint, and has very readable type. It's full of beautiful photos, but they don't overwhelm the wealth of information. Page layouts are varied with enough white space to keep you moving along. The editors cover EVERYTHING! There are many maps, and each location is handily indexed to a map site and page. The text is honest, straight-forward, and interesting with plenty of variation in type face. The movable Location Finder helps you quickly find what you need.

Interesting how perceptions & ratings vary re: the same material. Contrary to some, I found this book to be a fine historical piece. Written in saga form (to evoke the people & times it is intended to describe), this novel captures the clean-lined, flat beauty of saga prose. The story itself reflects the last 50 years or so of the Norse colony in Greenland as it slid into oblivion beneath the combined weight of a dramatically colder climate & its consequent abandonment by Europe. Increasingly beleaguered by a climate which shrunk the growing and grazing seasons and made it more difficult to attempt the ocean-going passage to Greenland using the available sea-going technology of the times, the Greenlanders soon found themselves facing another threat as well: the Eskimos who moved down into their territory, attracted by the colder climate. The inevitable culture clashes result, leading to violence which can only end in one way for the Greenlanders who cannot compete in this new environment with the nomadic, hunting culture of these other peoples.

At the same time, the Black Death in Europe caused the Europeans to briefly turn inward, exacerbating the dwindling of the trade connection which the Greenlanders found themselves to be more and more dependent on.

The story follows the coming of age of a young Greenland girl, Margaret, who is one of the last representatives of her modestly prosperous farm family. As she grows to womanhood she sees the steady & inexorable decline all about her of her way of life, while doing her best to hold things together. We see the Greenlanders feuding among themselves, as these Norse folk were wont to do in other venues, their conflicts & momentary triumphs in dealings with the Norewgian traders who visit them less & less often, their voyages to the North American coast (in search of valued timber & the long lost country of Vinland the Good), and finally their ill-fated contacts with the newly arriving Eskimos. In all, a good tale and true to its sources (both Icelandic saga and Eskimo legends which have come down to us from the indigenous peoples of Greenland who still recall their first encounters with the Europeans).

Although I prefer more action in my stories, this one was a powerful protrayal of a people and a time now lost to us beneath the ice and snows of Greenland -- even as the first tentative steps were being taken by Europeans to cross the Atlantic in more southerly climes . . . with more lasting results.

SWM

A friend of mine recommended this book years ago, and just recently I got around to reading it. What an experience! Smiley has managed to capture the essence of a Norse saga here in content and language; often the words seem a translation of some ancient text. It's simply enthralling, from the characters you watch grow and change over decades to the unchanging, foreign, and overwhelming landscape of Greenland. Highly recommended, especially for anyone who enjoys historical fiction. This strange and beautiful novel was the best book I've read in years.

The story begins at the peak of the Greenlander's prosperity and the reader joins it for the downhill slide. The culture of the Greenlanders accepts hardship, even anticipates hardship, while recollecting that life was better before -- before when the bishop was alive, before when walrus and reindeer were plentiful, before when the ships came often, before when the cows were strong enough to walk out of the cowbyre in the spring. Their communities deteriorate slowly but surely through the generations of this book, each generation working harder to get by with less and less and less. On my last reading, I stopped short of the ending, preferring to remember the characters as they were, rather than as they would become.

Having recently started reading Dirk Pitt and his Numa Gang, I read this book for the first time and it introduced me to Dirk Pitt and his friends at Numa. As I have read this book twice already I have enjoyed every aspect of it especially with a new twist to fans of Indiana Jones and James Bond. Clive Cussler has really caught my attention after reading his novel Treasure which discusses Dirk Pitt and Numa's hunt for the Lost Library of Alexandria. In it Clive Cussler catches all us fans of modern day adventure and action which involves the fight of counter-terrorism with one of the main villains being kinda like the terrorist assasin known as the Jackal.
In the way the James Bond and Indiana Jones brought the thrill of Saturday Movies back Cussler keeps the reader moving and continually wanting to read more of his book. I especially love the way Cussler brings the final showdown of this book in an unexpecting area where people would not find the legendary Library of Alexandria. Cussler even adds the famous James Bond comical wit and finesse in his book between Dirk Pitt and his partner in crime Al Giordino and the other characters within this book. It always make you laugh and smile once the finesse and wit are done throughout the book. At times when the story can be serious in his writing.
Treasure has really opened my enjoyment and interests in Clive
Cussler and his hero Dirk Pitt and Numa gang. To the new reader of this book it will make you enjoy Clive Cussler as one of our best action adventure writers in the 20th and 21st Century. Thanks so much Clive for the enjoyment of reading your hero and his exploits.

I picked this up again on a second-hand book shelf in a local hospital having read it when it first came out. Fourteen years later it hasn't lost any of its appeal. Brilliantly narrated with quick precise action, the James Bond-esqe 'joie de vivre' and panache of Dirk Pitt means he is the modern Indiana Jones. The plot weaves as intricately as ever from the Roman galleys in Tunisia to modern day Mexico without any let up. The formula is the same as ever, the results we already know but it's how Cussler delivers his hero's victory against the odds with his faithful sidekick and NUMA friends that makes these still readable after all this time

as usual my favorite heros Dirk, and Al have taken us around the world and have saved the day. this book was quite the page turner. I could barely put it down ( i did get a sunburn from forgetting to turn over while reading this book):o)

Kudos to Cussler!

This woman truly loves the high north, with all its paradox and ambivalence . . . Erlich paints the beauty and complexity of northern Greenland (before reading this book it never occurred to me to think of Greenland as HAVING a "north" and "south"!) and the struggle a tiny minority are having to maintain their ancient -- and sustainable -- ways of life. I'd classify this first of all as a love story between woman and land, but it is a love story in which the sentient observer is aware of the problems with the beloved, and yet still remains committed.
This is not a "been there, seen that, got the T-shirt" travel book -- Erlich is drawn to Greenland no fewer than seven times, in various seasons, and she lives with the people in traditional housing (including tents on the ice). She encounters the brutality of bureaucracy as well as the incredible hospitality of the Inuit -- and at the same time she does not shrink from the pervasive alcoholism and domestic violence that are a sad feature of northern life, nor does she neglect to mention the impact even in Greenland of the growing pollution in "the south" (i.e. North America). Her thesis is essentially Romantic in a philosophic sense . . . subsistence living was/is hard but authentic. The coming of modernity, with its internet connection, TV, store-bought goods, etc., has removed both the means and the incentive for a life of integrity. She leaves it to the reader to see the Greenlandic experience as paradigmatic of the wider world.
Read this book - it will lift your heart and trouble your mind, and leave you wanting more.

There are books and then there are "fulcrum" books. "This Cold
Heaven" is one of those that tips the reader into a place and
people that changes the light with which the world is seen.
The Greenland that Gretel Ehrlich describes will never
be experienced by the vast number of us
(thankfully so, for its own sake), but no reader will ever
doubt the impact of the beauty and harshness of the
Arctic environment on those who live there. To convey
to us a sense of that remote place and its animals and
the Inuit people is Ehrlich's passion and her genius.
Unlike some writers who spend a few months in research
and then write with mock authority, her voice has been
Greenland-seasoned seven times since 1993. Her view is
subtle and encompassing, yet leavened with the humility
of one who comes from the outside looking in.

Ehrlich's writing style is richly poetic, strong in metaphor
and allusion. By interrupting her own lyric voice
with the deliberate descriptions of early Arctic
explorers, she creates a blend of the fanciful and the
matter-of-fact that broadly reflects the Inuit
view of life, past and present. In the end, however,
and inspite of her admiration for the subsitence hunter,
she squarely questions the viability of the traditional lifestyle
in the face of modern consumerism. The answer, Ehrlich suggests,
is the one we've come to expect and, tragically, to accept.

Lest the reader fancies that traveling to Greenland to sample
a subsistence life is a good idea, hold on to this: you
don't belong there. Let this book be your window and your
mirror. Use it to visit a wisdom that, with any luck, may
affect you at your very core.

Greenland isn't green at all, but the world's largest island is covered by the biggest continental ice shelf in the world. Sparsely populated on the rocky outer fringes of its 840,000 square miles, it's probably as unknown to Americans as anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Gretel Ehrlich knows its ice leads and midnight sun as well as any American, and probably as well as any non-Inuit except for a handful of Danes, whose territory it is. That's because she's obsessed with the North in general and with Greenland in particular. Over the past decade, she has traveled to the frozen island at least seven times, staying for months at a stretch, traveling long distances by dogsled, making friends with hunters and villagers, and participating in seal and
polar bear hunts. Erlich chronicles her trips and relationships in a new book called "This Cold Heaven." ((...) 377 pages, Pantheon Books) She does far more than record her own journeys, however. She also puts Greenland into cultural, historical, and anthropological perspective by weaving her trips with those of Knud Rasmussen, who died in 1933 after traversing the polar North from Greenland to Alaska. Even now, some of Greenlandic culture is largely unchanged from the days when Rasmussen and his close friend Peter Freuchen made "first" contact with some of the bands of isolated Inuit (Eskimos) on the island. Bears, seals, hare, fox and walrus are still hunted for food, clothing and fuel made from blubber, dogsled is still the chief method of land transport, and ancient stories and religion abound. There are modern encroachments, however - Danish bureaucracy, snowmobiles, alcohol, helicopters, and cars, to say nothing of the enormous American military base at Thule. Erlich is enticed by the old ways, which seem as pristine and "unbroken" as Greenland's vast ice. She is also enticed by the ice itself, communal life, the land, and the dramatic ways with which Inuit culture deals with a nature it cannot dominate. Her own use of language sometimes approaches the poetic, which isn't so surprising when you learn that she's a poet, too. Using the specialized language of poetry, Erlich is able to render what might seem a static and frozen environment into one that lives and breathes on the page. She's at her best when she describes the physical world, whether populated by other humans at the time or only by 25 varieties of ice, snow, and the midnight sun. She does a good job, too, of delving into the lives of both exiled Danes and Greenlanders, and when she doesn't know something, she's not afraid to say so. More often than not, she finds out and lets the reader know. Sometimes, I found certain facts repeated and wasn't sure why. Not a huge deal, but distracting. Also, I would have liked to know a little more about the personal relationships Erlich cultivated on the island, although that wasn't the purpose of the book, and is almost a compliment, rather than a criticism, because I found her such an interesting person. Her aim was to view history, cultural observation and travel through her own prism, and to create a picture of Greenland that is simultaneously unique and universal and conveys the essence of the unlikely place she has come to love. If those are, in fact, her goals, Erlich succeeds.