The Place Where You Go to Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music
Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? For the past thirty years, the vastness of Alaska has swept through the distant reaches of the composer’s imagination and every corner of his compositions. In this new book Adams proposes an ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his …
Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration presents the results of 15 years of research for NASA and the Department of Defense concerning the factors that contribute to adjustment and sustained human performance under conditions of isolation and confinement. The research involved the study of previous space operations and conditions on Earth, such as submarines, Antarctic stations, …
In 1886, the Ihalmiut people of northern Canada numbered seven thousand; by 1946, when Farley Mowat began his two-year stay in the Arctic, the population had fallen to just forty. With them, he observed for the first time the phenomenon that would inspire him for the rest of his life: the millennia-old migration of the Arctic’s caribou herds. …
Shackleton’s Forgotten Men: The Untold Tale of an Antarctic Tragedy (Adrenaline Classics)
This is a dramatic true story of Antarctic tragedy and survival among the heroic group that was to lay supplies across the Great Ross Ice Shelf in preparation for the Endurance expedition. Launched by Shackleton (and led by Captain Aenaes Mackintosh), this courageous crew completed the longest sledge journey in polar history (199 days) and endured near-unimaginable deprivation. …
The mysterious stone figures known as inuksuit can be found throughout the circumpolar world. Built from whatever stones are at hand, each one is unique. Inuksuit are among the oldest and most important objects placed by humans upon the vast Arctic landscape and have become a familiar symbol of the Inuit and of their homeland. In Norman Hallendy’s …
In Under Ice, William Leary examines the evolution of Arctic submarine operations in the U.S. Navy, a little-known but significant area of national security concern. Through the career of Waldo Lyon, he chronicles the problems of under-ice navigation and the development of Cold War naval strategy.In World War II, the Arctic became an active theater of operations for …
The Home of the Blizzard: A Heroic Tale of Antarctic Exploration and Survival
In The Home of the Blizzard, Sir Douglas Mawson records his historic expedition to explore uncharted land in Antarctica. Pitted against formidable natural forces, he and his team faced unrelenting winds with speeds of up to two hundred miles per hour as well as freezing temperatures and day-long blizzards. They traversed the previously unexplored King George V Land directly south …
Yup’ik Elders at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin: Fieldwork Turned on Its Head
Norwegian adventurer Johan Adrian Jacobsen collected more than two thousand Yup’ik objects during his travels in Alaska in 1882 and 1883. Now housed in the Berlin Ethnological Museum, the Jacobsen collection remains one of the earliest and largest from Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. When Ann Fienup-Riordan first saw the collection being unpacked in 1994, she was “stunned to find …
James Fitzjames was a hero of the early nineteenth-century Royal Navy. A charismatic man with a wicked sense of humour, he pursued his naval career with wily determination. When he joined the Franklin Expedition at the age of 32 he thought he would make his name. But instead the expedition completely disappeared and he never returned. Its fate …
From 1850 to 1854, the ambitious Commander Robert McClure captained the HMS Investigator on a voyage in search of the missing Franklin Expedition, which sailed from England into the Arctic in 1845 to map the last uncharted section of the North-West Passage. The Investigator and her consort the Enterprise were to pass through the Bering Strait from the …