People have perennially projected their fantasies onto the North as a frozen no-man's-land full of marauding Vikings or as the unspoiled landscape of a purer, more elemental form of life.
Bernd Brunner recovers the encounters of adventurers with its dramatic vistas, fierce weather, exotic treasures and indigenous peoples-and with the literary sagas that seemed to offer an alternate ( whiter and superior ) cultural origin story to those of decadent Greece or Rome, and the moralistic Semitic Bible. The Left has idealised Scandinavian social democracy. The Right borrows from a long history of crackpot theories of Northern origins. Nordic phenotypes characterised eugenics, which in turn influenced America's limits on immigration.
The North, Brunner argues, was as much invented as discovered. A valuable contribution to intellectual history, full of vivid documentation, Extreme North is an enlightening journey through a place that is real, but also, in fascinating and very disturbing ways, imaginary.
Bernd Brunner is a historian, lecturer, and author of many acclaimed books. He splits his time between Istanbul and Berlin. Jefferson Chase has translated works by Thomas Mann and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, among others. He lives in Berlin.
Title: Extreme North: A Cultural History
Author: Brunner, Bernd
ISBN: 9780393881004
Binding:
Publisher: WW Norton & Co
Publication Date: 2022-03-29
Number of Pages: 256
Weight: 0.4301 kg
German historian of culture and science Bernd Brunner, in his book Extreme North, weaves a darker tapestry, layering legends over the science and history of the north to describe a place that is real, remote, inscrutable and cold. -- Josie Glausiusz - Nature
A collection of curiosities... There may not be a great deal of sunniness here, or for that matter warmth, but the book makes up for that with fascinating anecdotes, useful digressions and little nuggets of interest. -- James Lovegrove - Financial Times
Brunner's own cabinet of curiosities offers both a delightful series of vignettes of the north, including Mary Wollstonecraft's description of the perpetual summer light as the 'noon of the night', and a gallery of the preconceptions and agendas which successive visitors have carried with them...Brunner's work is a dizzying tour of the ways in which successive ages have engaged with the idea of the north... More than anything, though, the book is a reminder that the north is both a place and a perspective. -- Philip Parker - Literary Review
In 31 chapters, each as self-contained and pointed as a shard of ice, Brunner presents a different historic, political, natural or cultural facet of his subject... Thought-provoking and wide-ranging, Extreme North resembles the 'cabinet of wonders' that he uses as the book's embarkation point. -- Liesl Schillinger - The New York Times Book Review
