Here are 100 books that The Arctic Grail fans have personally recommended if you like
The Arctic Grail.
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There’s nothing like personal experience. You have to read the literature, it’s true. That’s how we’ve all met here at Shepherd. But you have to roll up your sleeves and get down to visiting, too, if you want to write about travel. I first approached the Arctic in 1991 and I return above sixty degrees north every year, although I must confess to a secret advantage; I married a Finn. We spend summers at a little cabin north of Helsinki. I know the region personally, I keep coming back, and I invite you, whenever you can, to come up and join us!
Barry Lopez was a nature writer and environmentalist.
He died on Christmas day 2020, and although we are fortunate to have his valedictory book Horizon, published when his traveling days were pretty well behind him, Arctic Dreams is the real deal, with Lopez as raconteur, but practitioner too, thoroughly in his element.
Lopez writes about exploration and the aurora, animals and the weather, ice and myth and survival and joy. He’s effortless. You’ll learn more than you knew there was to know about the high north, and the pleasure is in the learning.
If you must cut to the chase with these five books, Arctic
Dreams is the book, because Barry Lopez got things right.
'A master nature writer' (New York Times) provides the ultimate natural, social and cultural history of the Arctic landscape.
The author of Horizon's classic work explores the Arctic landscape and the hold it continues to exert on our imagination.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT MACFARLANE
Lopez's journey across our frozen planet is a celebration of the Arctic in all its guises. A hostile landscape of ice, freezing oceans and dazzling skyscapes. Home to millions of diverse animals and people. The stage to massive migrations by land, sea and air. The setting of epic exploratory…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
For five years I hitchhiked round the world, for the most part in a kilt. I cycled 5000 miles behind the Iron Curtain before it fell and took a dog team across Alaska. I’ve sailed solo round Ireland and endured storms off Greenland. Currently, I’m cycling in stages from North Cape to Cape Town. Unconventional travel has been a part of my life for forty years. As a writer I try to inform and entertain, and my eye is drawn to quirky detail and humour. I’m inspired by wild places and the people who live in them: their customs and intrinsic wisdom. In particular I’m fascinated by the Far North and have travelled extensively throughout this region.
Scotsman John Rae was the greatest explorer of the Canadian Arctic that ever lived. Yet he was vilified in the press, his reputation sullied. For ten years he was denied the £10,000 reward that was rightfully his for discovering the fate of the Franklin expedition and the knighthood awarded to lesser achievers was cruelly withheld. Why? Because he ‘went native’ and adopted Inuit survival techniques considered ‘uncivilised’ in Victorian Britain - but above all because he discovered, and had the temerity to announce, that the Franklin survivors had resorted to cannibalism. This book is an enthralling account of Rae’s life. I had actually set out to write a biography myself, unable to believe that such a story had not been written up, when McGoogan’s book appeared. I have nothing but reverence for his work, and imagine ‘Sir’ John Rae as I believe he will one day be, would be equally…
John Rae's accomplishments, surpassing all nineteenth-century Arctic explorers, were worthy of honors and international fame. No explorer even approached Rae's prolific record: 1,776 miles surveyed of uncharted territory; 6,555 miles hiked on snowshoes; and 6,700 miles navigated in small boats. Yet, he was denied fair recognition of his discoveries because he dared to utter the truth about the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew, Rae's predecessors in the far north. Author Ken McGoogan vividly narrates the astonishing adventures of Rae, who found the last link to the Northwest Passage and uncovered the grisly truth about the cannibalism of…
For five years I hitchhiked round the world, for the most part in a kilt. I cycled 5000 miles behind the Iron Curtain before it fell and took a dog team across Alaska. I’ve sailed solo round Ireland and endured storms off Greenland. Currently, I’m cycling in stages from North Cape to Cape Town. Unconventional travel has been a part of my life for forty years. As a writer I try to inform and entertain, and my eye is drawn to quirky detail and humour. I’m inspired by wild places and the people who live in them: their customs and intrinsic wisdom. In particular I’m fascinated by the Far North and have travelled extensively throughout this region.
Nansen, ‘the father of polar exploration’ (and a great fan of Rae) was not just the first man to cross Greenland, to endure an intentional two-year drift towards the North Pole in an ice-locked ship and to turn skiing into a popular sport, but he was also a heartthrob diplomat, a founder of independent Norway, the first to introduce a tractor to Russia and a mediator in the enforced mass migrations of millions of displaced people. Did you know, for example, that while Robert Falcon Scott was discovering he’d been beaten to the Pole, his wife Kathleen was sharing a bed with Nansen in a Berlin hotel? The span of this book is immense and the fascination of its subject - an early sex symbol and media superstar - won’t disappoint.
Behind the great polar explorers of the early twentieth century - Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott in the South and Peary in the North - looms the spirit of Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), the mentor of them all. He was the father of modern polar exploration, the last act of territorial discovery before the leap into space began. Nansen was a prime illustration of Carlyle's dictum that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men'. He was not merely a pioneer in the wildly diverse fields of oceanography and skiing, but one of the founders of neurology. A restless,…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Kim Brown Seely was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from Stanford University. A Lowell Thomas Journalist of the Year, she has worked in publishing on both coasts, including as senior editor at Travel + Leisure magazine, contributing editor at National Geographic Adventure, and travel editor at Microsoft and Amazon. Her memoir Uncharted: A Couple’s Epic Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing from One Life to Another was named one of the best books about retirement by the Wall Street Journal and is also a Nautilus Award Winner. She has traveled to more than thirty countries for Virtuoso magazine, where she's a contributing writer and has won more than a dozen writing awards for her work.
I first read Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings when I was the travel books editor at Amazon and took it home to review.
British-born Raban’s solo sailing journey from Seattle to Juneau, Alaska, is a riveting take on navigating the Inside Passage (the intricate waterway between Puget Sound and Alaska), weaving together history, science, literature, and intimate descriptions of his life at sea.
While Raban can be a prickly narrator, Passage to Juneau is extraordinary narrative nonfiction and was the initial inspiration for my own book and many seasons now spent boating (and reading) afloat.
With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. The physical distance is 1,000 miles of difficult-and often treacherous-water, which Raban navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat.
But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers-- between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class. Along the way, Raban offers captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation…
I’ve had a passion for northern places ever since I was a kid. I prefer locales that boast plenty of nature and not very many human beings. I’ve been to Greenland 15 times, but only once to Paris and never to Rome (Rome in New York State once). The more remote the locale, the better. Which is why I’ve only once been to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, but several times to almost never visited villages in East Greenland.
Snow Man offers a portrait of John Hornby, an Arctic adventurer who had no interest in being the first person to visit the North Pole or traverse the Northwest Passage, but who simply wanted to hang out in the Arctic in order to experience both hardships and delight. The book’s story deals with Hornby’s overwintering in an esker in the Central Canadian Arctic with a total novice, an Englishman named Critchell-Bullock. This 1931 book had been neglected, so I got it back into print and I wrote an introduction to it.
I grew up in Los Angeles, California, which is frequently imagined as well as experienced. As a child, we lived by the beach and in the foothills of Angeles National Forest. The leaps of faith you make in this landscape were always clear: earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides occur regularly. The question asked often about the Arctic: “why on earth do people live there?” applies also to California: life in beautiful landscapes and seascapes is risky. Then, I made my first trip to Iceland alone in 1995, and have now been to Iceland ten times, Greenland twice, and Nayan Mar, above the Russian Arctic Circle, each time with fascination.
This book has beautiful illustrations and completely covers the history of both European and native conceptions of the North Pole from the ancient times to the present day in just 254 pages.
People believed the most amazing things about the North Pole in the past, including that it was an ice-free fruitful paradise! Why?
In North Pole, Michael Bravo explains how visions of the North Pole have been supremely important to the world's cultures and political leaders, from Alexander the Great to neo-Hindu nationalists. Tracing poles and polarity back to sacred ancient civilizations, this book explores how the idea of a North Pole has given rise to utopias, satires, fantasies, paradoxes and nationalist ideologies, from the Renaissance to the Third Reich.
The Victorian conceit of the polar regions as a vast empty wilderness, and the preserve of white males battling against the elements, was far from the only polar vision. Michael Bravo shows an…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I grew up on the tip of a peninsula jutting out into the raging Atlantic ocean. Both of my grandfathers spent their lives at sea. The power, and fear, that the ocean inspires has been a constant in my life, and most recently while working on Acadian Driftwood. Spending years working on a story so closely tied to tragedy, and the sea, I’ve consumed a lot of nautical disaster stories. While not everything on the list is a disaster (Nansen got his ship stuck in the ice on purpose) each story will make you rethink whether you ever want to head out to sea.
Years before Shackleton and his crew became locked in the ice in Antarctica, Fridtjof Nansen his crew, and more than one hundred dogs got their ship stuck at the opposite end of the earth. But they did it on purpose. Before the modern understanding of oceanic currents, Nansen proposed that if he let his ship become locked in the polar ice, he and his crew would drift, very slowly, all the way to the North Pole. Three years later he and one other emerged shipless, frozen, and covered in walrus skin on a rocky island above the arctic circle. His ship? Safely on its way back to Norway. What happened in-between is almost unbelievable.
"If Outside magazine had been around during the first turn of the century, Fridtjof Nansen would have been its No. 1 cover boy." The Chicago Sun-Times In September of 1893, Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen and crew manned the schooner Fram, intending to drift, frozen in the Arctic pack-ice, to the North Pole. When it became clear that they would miss the pole, Nansen and companion Hjalmar Johansen struck off by themselves. Racing the shrinking pack-ice, they attempted, by dog-sled, to go "farthest north." They survived a winter in a moss hut eating walruses and polar bears, and the public assumed…
I’ve spent 20 years researching Antarctica and polar history to learn about my father’s experiences on Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s III expedition or the USASE in 1939-41. I’ve been passionate about art, travel, and learning about other cultures for most of my life. I’m excited to say, I’ve worked on all the continents! My interests led me to a career as a leadership consultant, executive coach and team facilitator. Since 2020, I have had a dream job working with Antarctic scientists and teams, assisting them to manage stress and conflict in the field. With a lifetime of experience in the performing arts, my work inspires leaders to unlock their full potential and drive meaningful change.
I’m delighted to see Matthew Henson’s whole story in a graphic novel. I feel empowered by the extent of his contributions in reaching the North Pole.
The story’s dialog and illustrations put me in the middle of Henson’s thrilling adventures. I’m happy his legacy lives on because it’s an important story for polar history and cross-cultural collaboration.
In this graphic novel, Simon Schwartz weaves biography and fiction together to explore the life of Arctic adventurer Matthew Henson. Moving between different time periods and incorporating Inuit mythology, Schwartz offers a fresh perspective on the many challenges Henson confronted during his life.
As a member of early missions to reach the North Pole, Henson braved subzero temperatures and shifting sea ice. As an African American at the turn of the twentieth century, he also faced harassment and prejudice. Henson won a place on Arctic expeditions through skill and determination―though he didn't receive the same credit as his teammates. He…
I read every single day without fail. So I have read a lot of books over the years. I am always so impressed with- and love- a good, twisty, surprise ending. From children’s books to middle grade to adult… surprise me at the end, and I’m in! (Extra points for making me cry a little bit!) If you, too, love a good twist at the end of a story, give these books a try!
Just try to read this book to a child around the holidays and not cry! I go to this book when I feel too wrapped up in the busyness of the holiday season and forget what it is really about. The story and the illustrations are beautiful. But it is the message that has me blinking back tears every time.
The little boy’s lost reindeer’s bell from Santa appearing magically under his tree, ringing its beautiful sound Christmas morning, is just the first reason it’s so wonderful. But then VanAllsburg says that the grownups cannot hear it ring! How can that be? Because we grown-ups, sadly, have lost the magic of Christmas. (I read this to get the magic back!)
Discover The Polar Express, a true Christmas classic. "Magical" Guardian "Evocative and atmospheric" Sunday Times "A thrilling tale" Independent All aboard the Polar Express to the North Pole! Follow one boy's journey to receive a very special gift from Santa himself: a bell that only true believers in Father Christmas can hear ring. Discover the beloved Christmas classic that inspired the blockbuster family favourite movie starring Tom Hanks.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I was such a die-hard fan of Santa Claus as a kid, my mom had to debunk the myth two years in a row! Because, yeah, I heard you, but surely that was a bad attempt at humor last year. I won’t lie. It was traumatic. I wrote this book as a way to ease kids into the knowledge without anyone in the family feeling bad about it. It puts a great positive spin on this childhood rite of passage and empowers kids to get the info when they’re ready for it.
This is a beautiful book that delves into the origins of the Big Guy but also chronicles the contemporary images to which kids have been exposed. It’s filled with short magazine-like articles about pretty much anything you can think of that’s Santa related. Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer? Miracle on 34th street? How about Santa’s favorite cookie recipe? All there and SO much more! Clear a prime spot on the coffee table and wipe those fingers before you turn the page.
He's a symbol of hope and hapiness, of generosity and benevolence. Santa Clause is simply one of the most beloved legends ever embraced. The Story of Santa explores the history of Father Christmas. Who is he, really? Where did he come from? (His origins may surprise you!) Why does he fulfill our wishes? And what can we learn from him?
He's become a ubiquitous figure during the Christmas season with his white beard, red suit, and prominent belly, but just how much do those celebrating the happy holiday really know about Santa Claus? Here is the whole story from the…
