Best books … chosen by Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert is the co-editor of The Ends of the Earth, a new anthology of writings about the North and South poles. Here, she names six of her favorite books about the Arctic.
Independent People by Halldór Laxness (Vintage, $15). Poet and novelist Brad Leithauser has written that this 1946 novel is about sheep, which, in a way, is true. It’s also about hunger and loneliness and cold, and yet in many ways it’s funny. Independent People, which secured its Icelandic author the Nobel Prize, is a great, weird, thoroughly memorable tale.
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The Two-Mile Time Machine by Richard Alley (Princeton, $20). Alley, a glaciologist, spent several summers at a research station on the top of the Greenland ice sheet, helping to drill an ice core more than 10,000 feet long. His experiences at the station, known as GISP2, and the amazing climate information contained in Greenland cores are the basis for this fascinating book. Reading it will make you look at the world in a new way. Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez (Vintage, $15). Arctic Dreams might be described as a love letter to the Far North. Lopez writes lyrically of musk oxen and narwhals, pack ice and phytoplankton. The book was first published 20 years ago, and it is crushing to realize how, in the intervening decades, much of the landscape it describes has been irrevocably altered by climate change.
Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen (out of print). In 1893, Nansen set off for the North Pole in a wooden boat. His deliberate plan was to become icebound and to drift. His account of the three-year voyage, which actually ended several degrees shy of his goal, is by turns poetic and stoical.
In the Land of White Death by Valerian Albanov (Modern Library, $15). Albanov, a Russian navigator, was one of only two men to make it home alive from an expedition that began in 1912. In the Land of White Death is, if not the gloomiest of the many Arctic journals that have survived, the one that edges closest to existential farce.
An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (New York Review, $13). Tété-Michel Kpomassie was born in Togo in 1941. As a teenager, he opened a book about Eskimos and began, in his words, “dreaming of eternal cold.” Improbably enough, he managed to make his way to Greenland. His chronicle of his stay on the island is frank and affectionate, without being sentimental.
