Word: greenlands
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...begins a remarkable, brooding detective thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish writer whose work is new to the U.S. The story's grim background is Denmark's exploitation of Greenland, the bleak northern island given its bosky name by Erik the Red, an early real estate promoter who hoped to attract settlers. Most recently, Danes have mined and exhausted Greenland's vast reserves of cryolite, a mineral used in the refining of aluminum, while giving only perfunctory and highly patronizing attention to the culture of the native Inuit...
That's the antiestablishment view of Hoeg's heroine, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her mother, a hunter and tracker, and the comfortable wealth of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Smilla knows both science and snow, but she is too rebellious to work regularly for the ruling Danes. She is at loose ends in Copenhagen when a six-year-old Eskimo boy she has befriended slips from the snowy roof of their apartment house and is killed. An accident, of course; but the boy, Smilla knows, wouldn't normally have been...
...looks as though the concept of long-term stability may be wrong. According to two articles in last week's Nature, deep holes drilled into the ancient ice of Greenland have brought up evidence of sudden, dramatic swings in climate during the last interglacial period, about 120,000 years ago. Several times, average global temperatures dropped as much as 25 degreesF, plunging the planet back into ice-age conditions, and stayed there for tens or hundreds of years before recovering. And the changes happened not over centuries, as scientists would have predicted, but in as little as a decade...
...cycle's first volume was The Ice-Shirt, a brooding narration of the settling of Greenland and Vinland. Fathers and Crows has six glossaries, endless footnotes, maps and epigraphs, a 47-page biography of St. Ignatius Loyola and nearly 1,000 pages. It relates Jesuit efforts to convert Huron and Iroquois Indians in the early 17th century, but the author prepares his narration so thoroughly that major characters are not introduced before the book's tardy midpoint...
Wilson has authored 14 books. He considers his best work to be Ice Brothers, a novel about U.S. ship patrols off the coast of Greenland during World War II. But it is Gray Flannel that put him on the literary map and landed his name in Bartlett's Book of Quotations...