The Magnetic North / Sara Wheeler

The Magnetic North: notes from the Arctic Circle by Sara Wheeler. 315 p.

Wheeler visits scientific outposts, Soviet cities, reindeer herders and tour boats all around the Arctic. As always, any native peoples had their ways of life destroyed in the 20th century--nomads forced to live in cities, that sort of thing. It doesn't matter which country they were in; Soviets and Canadians handled native matters in much the same way, with much the same result. Reading about scientific outposts was the most interesting part for me. The Soviet history of various places was really depressing, as were most of the Arctic exploration stories--too many of which ended in with people barely surviving horrible conditions for which they were unprepared. Of course, many more didn't survive those conditions.

One thing I found incredibly annoying about this book is that photos are used throughout, but all of the photo captions are listed on a couple of pages right after the table of contents. So if you want to know who's in the photo, or what exactly it's a photo of, you have to flip back to the beginning of the book. That made it much easier for the publisher to lay out the book, I'm sure, but it's very frustrating for the reader.

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