Word: birkeland
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fitting, in an ironic sense, that BBC journalist Lucy Jago chose Kristian Birkeland for the subject of her first book. Birkeland unlocked the secrets of the aurora borealis, and it was the British that scoffed at Birkeland’s theories and dismissed his work in the early 1900s. The Northern Lights recounts Birkeland’s life-long journey through the still-fledgling fields of electromagnetism and solar astronomy. Jago’s book, although well-written and interesting, fails to rise to the level of “thrilling” that the publisher touts...
...Birkeland, a native Norwegian, spent a year on a remote Finnish mountain tracking the magnetic fields of the Earth and their relationship to the auroras, the so-called northern lights. At the end of the nineteenth century, the setting of Jago’s account, the northern lights were still a mystery—heralded by some as messages from the gods and by others as signals from the dead. Jago manages to successfully transport the reader to Birkeland’s world, where adventurers still dreamed not of faraway planets, stars and moons, but of uncharted mountains, desolate frozen...
...rise to the scientifically stimulating level of a book like Dava Sobel’s Longitude or to the level of thrilling adventure stories like Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Journey. Nonetheless, Jago should be applauded for her well-researched attempt to grant Birkeland the credit the British denied him a century...