The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle
Wheeler thought her polar expedition days were over once she wrote about her Antarctica adventures in Terra Incognita (1998), but the Arctic lured her from her London home. As the best investigative travel writers do, Wheeler explores the past (most passionately the life of Norwegian explorer and Nobel laureate Fridtjof Nansen) and the present in a riveting, many-faceted chronicle. Wheeler describes her challenging Lapland sojourn (with her baby son) among endangered reindeer herders and reports grim facts about the Russian Arctic�s radioactive contamination. In Arctic Alaska, she rides with a woman trucker on the only highway to the Arctic Ocean and explains the damage done to �an Arctic Serengeti teeming with wildlife� by the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Wheeler visits scientists in Greenland, takes an Arctic cruise with her older son, and documents with verve and ire tragically �miscarried cultural assimilation and racial marginalization,� reckless development, and catastrophic pollution, which will all grow worse as the �big melt� accelerates and the Arctic becomes a hotly contested energy frontier. Mordantly funny, gritty, and bracing, Wheeler�s revelatory dispatches from climate-change central are essential. --Donna Seaman