i'm sad to see no one else has reviewed this book, so though it's been a while since i read it & my copy is lost in storage somewhere, i'll try to do this fine little story the justice it deserves: In this fast-reading autobiographical story our author Frank, in his younger days, enlists a young naval student for an ambitious foul-weather sail from England to Iceland in a 13' open dinghy. In the small but rich genre of dinghy cruising (which in the spirit modernity, i hereby rename "microcruising"), this is a must read. adding to the charm is frank's occasional mention of his girlfriend Margaret, who he later married, and who many years later wrote the bible of microcruising, the hugely instructional 'Dinghy Cruising'. Finally, if you like this book it seems impossible you would not also like Robert Manry's "Tinkerbelle," the cleanly told story of a flatlander who singlehands his dinghy from the US to England.

This is the sort of book one might buy as a souvenir. It consists of 119 pages of color photos which nicely capture the ambience of Iceland's capital city.

I read Miki Collins' Riding the Wild Side of Denali in one sitting on a cold November Yukon morning and dreamt about it for many days to follow. If you'd like to taste real adventure and feel the cold crispness of life on the Alaskan trail, grab this one! Here, Miki relates the empassioned tales, sometimes hair-raising, sometimes hilarious, that she shares with her twin sister Julie as they embark on their wildest dream (or folly!!), yet : that of utilizing Icelandic Fjord Horses on their remote trapline at the base of Mt. Denali, AK. If you'd like to find out what it takes to convince a bush pilot to fly a horse that would like to join him in the cockpit of his small plane, or want to read true tales of a modern day trapline, ran by two women, huskies and Icelandic Fjord horses, this is the book for you. Humour, respect for the animals, images of human determination and the natural beauty of the alaskan wilderness are the gifts Miki Collins will leave you with. Whether you are a wilderness, adventure or horse lover or dream of the North as the last frontier, you'll love it. It would also make a great gift for teenage girls: the Collins are true models of women becoming all they can be.

Excellent guide to this beautiful place in southern Iceland. Written by the folk museum's curator, Mr. Thordur Tomasson. Book in Icelandic.

Beautifully written by Krista Ruepp, Winter Pony is the story of a special bond between a young girl named Anna, and an Icelandic pony she calls Prince. But the pony is a winter pony - come summer, he must travel with his herd to the mountains, and leave Anna behind. A glimmer of Norse mythology is reflected in the storytelling, enhanced with rapturous color illustrations by Ulrike Heyne which bring to life a timeless and classically beautiful story of trust and friendship.

Of all the Nobel prizewinners in literature, the one who most elicits an uncomprehending reaction is the late Halldór Laxness, Iceland's greatest writer of the modern era. In my reading, I have always attempted at times to cross the mainstream and see what lies beyond. Iceland is as far from the mainstream as you can get and still be part of Western Culture. What we sometimes forget is that almost a thousand years ago, Iceland was a literary giant; and some of the sagas that came from that island are among the greatest works of literature ever written.

Laxness is therefore the recipient of a great tradition. Sadly, Iceland -- after discovering Greenland and North America and giving them up as a bad lot -- became a colony of Norway, and later of Denmark. The loss of hegemony coupled with the horrendous disasters of a mini ice age and catastrophic volcanic explosions led to a grinding poverty that drained the mind and spirit.

WORLD LIGHT is at one and the same time the greatest Laxness novel I have read and also the most difficult. Its hero, the poet Olaf Karason of Ljosavik, is born into poverty and spends his youth as a foster child in a home utterly lacking in love. After being kicked out, he moves to Svidinskvik, where he becomes a ward of the parish. He writes poems in support of local Danish bigwig, Peter Palsson, whose grandiloquent "Rehabilitation Company" is behind a series of mostly abortive moves to improve the town's economy and morale. The young poet is so feckless that it is difficult to identify with him, but as the story progressed, I began to see his flaws writ large over the entire landscape.

The cigar-chomping Danes go around either claiming "I'm no Icelander, s'help me!" or attempting to prove themselves the most patriotic Icelanders of all. We see Olaf's attempts at finding himself with an incredible array of characters, including Juel Juel Juel of Grim Hairycheek Ltd, Eternity-Dave (who only has three expressions: "Jesus" ... "My Brother!" ... "Heave up!"), a succession of women who share his bed and drive him to distraction, and a supporting cast large and odd enough to populate a Dickens novel.

I did say earlier that I found this Laxness's most difficult novel. It is difficult to know where the author is headed, though at the same time I kept getting drawn into the complex plot with its thick undergrowth of transitory characters. In the end, I saw Olaf's fecklessness being mirrored in the fecklessness of the Danish colonial administration, and the fecklessness of a pre-Independence Iceland that felt lost, and indeed of all human beings cast adrift upon the waters into a cruel world that mocks the life of the spirit and ends all too soon in disorder and early sorrow.

The translator of this edition, Magnus Magnusson, writes a beautiful clear English (that also comes across in his Icelandic saga translations). British readers may remember him as the TV host of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"

You will not be disappointed with WORLD LIGHT if you just persevere. Poverty of life and spirit never makes for easy reading, but Laxness rewards the reader who stays with him.

This novel looks nostalgically at rural life in Iceland and regrets the effects of a market economy on rural people with simple wants and needs. The protagonist, Bjartur of Summerhouses, is an obstinate, reactionary, and sometimes cruel herdsman who nonetheless possesses fine perception. Through this book, we learn a lot about the ecology of Iceland (it's a nice place to visit but don't try to raise sheep there), Bjartur, his family, and the society he belongs to. Author Halldor Laxness makes you appreciate the difficulties these people face but can also make you laugh out loud when he satirizes Bjartur's neighbors and the local gentry. I was impressed with this book and read many passages to my family. Unfortunately, there are also parts of the book where not much of interest happens for what seems like 50 or 75 pages at a time. I'm tempted to say that this would have been a better book if it were shorter but then Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature and I didn't.

I first read "Independent People" in 1996 after reading Brad Leithauser's essay in the "New York Review of Books." Leithauser's praise of the book and the author were so intriguing that I went to the library that day and found an earlier edition. I recently had the opportunity to read the book again, with Leithauser's essay serving as an introduction. A single reading cannot exhaust this outsize, obscure novel by the 1955 Nobel-prize winner from Iceland.

On a simple level, "Independent People" deals with the lives of the poor sheep grazers in Iceland early in the 20th Century. The hero is a farmer named Bajartur of Summerhouses who, after 18 years of working for another, the baliff, earns enough money to buy his own small farm. Bajartur's goal is to be independent and self-sufficient, to take what he earns and not take or give to others. In addition to this simple economic credo for independence. Bjartur is an "independent person" emotionally in his relationships with his wives -- he is twice married in the book -- his three sons and his daughter -- actually his first wife's daughter but not Bjartur's -- whom Bjartur names Asta Sollija the "beloved sun -lily" whom he refers to as his soul's "one flower." Much of this long, multi-faceted book involves Bjartur's relationship with Asta Sollija -- their estrangement and ultimate reconciliation.

Bjartur and Asta Sollija and their relationship frames but hardly exhausts this book. There is a picture of Iceland -- or of modernizing society in general with its conflict between farmer and town. There are long discussions of poetry and literature, of war, of politics, and particularly of philosophy and religion, see below. For all its length and seriousness, much of the book is funny, almost satirical in tone in the way it pokes fun at Bjartur and his intellectual and emotional limitations. The reader still comes to admire Bjartur for his fortitude and stubborness.

The book is timeless in character and the chronology is blurred. World War I plays a pivotal role in the middle of the book but the times before and the times after seem to be endless and undefined. There is something that is prototypical and archetypical about this book -- it is hardly an exercise in the realistic novel.

From a subsequent essay about Laxness by Brad Leithauser, I learned that Laxness was the kind of person generally called a seeker. This made me admire him and this book all the more and informed greatly my second reading. Growing up in a small, isolated nation, Laxness read exhaustively and put something of himself into his readings. He changed his mind many times during his life, being at various stages entirely secular, a socialist with perhaps communist leanings, and an adherent of various forms of Christianity. He took a rare delight in important ideas and showed an openness and fluidity to them that I find reflected in the themes of "Independent People." Most obviously, their is Bjartur's character with its emphasis on economic self-sufficiency and laissez-faire. This attitude leads to Bjartur's heroism but also his poverty, and it is contrasted artfully with the cooperative movemement and, implicitly, with a socialist approach to society in the early 20th century.

The book is pervaded by a strong spiritual tone. Bjartur for most of the book represents a position of independence and utter skepticism, but at key moments he does things not fully consistent with his stated beliefs. The book is framed by old Icelandic pagan legends and by spirits who are said to continue to haunt Bjartur's farm. We see various Christian ministers who in general are satirized in the course of the novel. But I was most impressed with the following erudite, and well-taken reference to Zoroastrianism, the religion of good and evil,which is alluded to many times during the course of the book and frames its story. In a moment of irony, Laxness puts the following speech early on, at Bjartur's first wedding, into the mouth of the bailiff's wife.

"I don't know whether you are aquainted with the religious beliefs of the Persians. This race believed that the god of light and the god of darkness waged eternal warfare, and that man's part was to assist the god of light in his struggle by the tilling of the fields and the improvement of the land. This is precisely what farmers do. They help God, if one may say so; work with God in the cultivation of plants, the tending of livestock, and the care of their fellow men. There exists no calling of greater nobility here on earth. Therefore, I would direct these words to all husbandmen, but first and foremost to our bridegroom of today: You sons of the soil whose labour is unending and leisure scanty, know, I bid you, how exalted is your vocation. Agriculture is work in co-operation with the Creator Himself, and in you is He well pleased." (p. 25)

I am intrigued by the repeated references to the "religion of the Persians" and to its appropriateness for the story. This quote,and its irony, reminds me of the sermon in "Moby Dick", a book which shares in its obscurity and in its questing character many of the qualities of this one. The speech shows the author's ability to adopt material from little-known traditions into his own ideas and work, and to make them live for the reader. It was one of the qualities that leapt out at me in my second reading of "Independent People."

This book remains a little-known masterpiece. It will reward those readers willing to take the time with it.

Haldor Laxness, the Nobel laurette and Icelandic genius, creates one of the most satisfying books with "Independent People." It is of such epic proportions and yet so earthy that one is continually struck by the dichotomy. The hero is a simple, poor farmer; he is not great, he will never be great (unlike Achilles who was great all his life). The landscape is so expansive and beautiful that it is hard to imagine a more magnificent scene, and yet this is also a land of hardship and famine and cold death. The book operates on so many levels that all one can do is bathe in its beauty and try to absorb as much as possible; whether the names (Asta Sollilja is exquisite), the land shapes, the farmers life, the love, the hate, the passage of time, the pressure of living an independent, free life, all of this deeply impress you upon reading the work. It is something I enjoyed, enjoy, and hope to read every year hence, so that I may enjoy the epiphanic revelations it provides.

Einar Gudmundsson is one of Iceland finest "younger" writers today. The story of his brother's psychiatric problems is an extraordinary story, told in a simple, matter-of-fact way that is moving beyond words. This book is a must read for everyone who claims to be tolerably well read. I must confess though that I may be rather partial, being the father of a young girl with the same diagnosis as Einar Mar Gudmundsson's brother. In that situation all I can say is, read this book, learn and enjoy

Einar Mar Gudmundsson's short but rich novel is dark, but it is not without humor -- and that's a good thing, since it's an 'inside' look at a young man slowly losing his grip on reality. He experiences paranoia and hallucinations, experiments with drugs, and is suffering from severe depression. He has his lighter moments -- in fact, he's an intelligent and lucid person much of the time -- but the weight of his madness slowly drags him further and further down.

The humor in the book comes in the form of some of his friends -- fellow-inmates at the Klepp Psychiatric Institute in Rekjavik. His portraits of some of the doctors, orderlies -- and police -- that he encounters will bring a smile to the reader as well.

The author is obviously pretty sensitive to the plight and conditions in which people suffering from mental illness live -- his characters, while embodying much humor, never come across as charicatures, but as real human beings. I've read that this novel has been (or is being) made into a film in Iceland -- like another reviewer below, I strongly hope that it makes it to the States. I'd love to see a well-made screen version -- I hope that the author has a great deal of control over it, to keep it true to the spirit of this enlightening and compelling novel.

I read this book shortly before a journey to Iceland, and was blown away. Gudmundsson's quirky, fragmentary style, coupled with his wrenching subject matter and astute, wry cultural observations, makes for an astounding read, even for those without knowledge of or interest in Iceland. Sadly now out of print, it is still worth a try to find -- this book makes clear why Gudmundsson won the Nordic Council prize and is regarded as one of Iceland's finest young contemporary novelists.

This is the best series of guide books. There are not many complete guides to Icleand. I studied this book before I went on my vacation to Icleand. After reading in the "places to see" section I chose exactly what I wanted to see in Iceland. It just so happens this book led me to take a 10 hour tour in Iceland that is not the most popular tour--it ended up being the best part of my trip. If you go to Iceland, take the South Shore tour and visit the black sand beach and smaller waterfalls--not just the Golden Circle. You can read all about the sights in this book. The restaurant guide is very helpful. I give it 4 stars because some of the information is outdated. For example there are lockers at the Blue Lagoon. And the book should tell tourists how the entrance to the thermal pools works--this is important, esp for non-European travellers.

This was a gift from my mother-in-law, she purchased the book before we went to Iceland. The book was only fair in explaining the culture and history, but as a travel guide it does very nicely. We keep this book in our car and use it to find our way around in Iceland. If you are wanting a book that explains the culture I would suggest Iceland: The Land of Sagas--But if you want a book that will help you with your trip to Iceland this is the book to purchase.

What a wonderful survey of Iceland! This 378-page book is printed on heavy, slick paper, unlike the usual travel-book newsprint, and has very readable type. It's full of beautiful photos, but they don't overwhelm the wealth of information. Page layouts are varied with enough white space to keep you moving along. The editors cover EVERYTHING! There are many maps, and each location is handily indexed to a map site and page. The text is honest, straight-forward, and interesting with plenty of variation in type face. The movable Location Finder helps you quickly find what you need.

This woman truly loves the high north, with all its paradox and ambivalence . . . Erlich paints the beauty and complexity of northern Greenland (before reading this book it never occurred to me to think of Greenland as HAVING a "north" and "south"!) and the struggle a tiny minority are having to maintain their ancient -- and sustainable -- ways of life. I'd classify this first of all as a love story between woman and land, but it is a love story in which the sentient observer is aware of the problems with the beloved, and yet still remains committed.
This is not a "been there, seen that, got the T-shirt" travel book -- Erlich is drawn to Greenland no fewer than seven times, in various seasons, and she lives with the people in traditional housing (including tents on the ice). She encounters the brutality of bureaucracy as well as the incredible hospitality of the Inuit -- and at the same time she does not shrink from the pervasive alcoholism and domestic violence that are a sad feature of northern life, nor does she neglect to mention the impact even in Greenland of the growing pollution in "the south" (i.e. North America). Her thesis is essentially Romantic in a philosophic sense . . . subsistence living was/is hard but authentic. The coming of modernity, with its internet connection, TV, store-bought goods, etc., has removed both the means and the incentive for a life of integrity. She leaves it to the reader to see the Greenlandic experience as paradigmatic of the wider world.
Read this book - it will lift your heart and trouble your mind, and leave you wanting more.

There are books and then there are "fulcrum" books. "This Cold
Heaven" is one of those that tips the reader into a place and
people that changes the light with which the world is seen.
The Greenland that Gretel Ehrlich describes will never
be experienced by the vast number of us
(thankfully so, for its own sake), but no reader will ever
doubt the impact of the beauty and harshness of the
Arctic environment on those who live there. To convey
to us a sense of that remote place and its animals and
the Inuit people is Ehrlich's passion and her genius.
Unlike some writers who spend a few months in research
and then write with mock authority, her voice has been
Greenland-seasoned seven times since 1993. Her view is
subtle and encompassing, yet leavened with the humility
of one who comes from the outside looking in.

Ehrlich's writing style is richly poetic, strong in metaphor
and allusion. By interrupting her own lyric voice
with the deliberate descriptions of early Arctic
explorers, she creates a blend of the fanciful and the
matter-of-fact that broadly reflects the Inuit
view of life, past and present. In the end, however,
and inspite of her admiration for the subsitence hunter,
she squarely questions the viability of the traditional lifestyle
in the face of modern consumerism. The answer, Ehrlich suggests,
is the one we've come to expect and, tragically, to accept.

Lest the reader fancies that traveling to Greenland to sample
a subsistence life is a good idea, hold on to this: you
don't belong there. Let this book be your window and your
mirror. Use it to visit a wisdom that, with any luck, may
affect you at your very core.

Greenland isn't green at all, but the world's largest island is covered by the biggest continental ice shelf in the world. Sparsely populated on the rocky outer fringes of its 840,000 square miles, it's probably as unknown to Americans as anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Gretel Ehrlich knows its ice leads and midnight sun as well as any American, and probably as well as any non-Inuit except for a handful of Danes, whose territory it is. That's because she's obsessed with the North in general and with Greenland in particular. Over the past decade, she has traveled to the frozen island at least seven times, staying for months at a stretch, traveling long distances by dogsled, making friends with hunters and villagers, and participating in seal and
polar bear hunts. Erlich chronicles her trips and relationships in a new book called "This Cold Heaven." ((...) 377 pages, Pantheon Books) She does far more than record her own journeys, however. She also puts Greenland into cultural, historical, and anthropological perspective by weaving her trips with those of Knud Rasmussen, who died in 1933 after traversing the polar North from Greenland to Alaska. Even now, some of Greenlandic culture is largely unchanged from the days when Rasmussen and his close friend Peter Freuchen made "first" contact with some of the bands of isolated Inuit (Eskimos) on the island. Bears, seals, hare, fox and walrus are still hunted for food, clothing and fuel made from blubber, dogsled is still the chief method of land transport, and ancient stories and religion abound. There are modern encroachments, however - Danish bureaucracy, snowmobiles, alcohol, helicopters, and cars, to say nothing of the enormous American military base at Thule. Erlich is enticed by the old ways, which seem as pristine and "unbroken" as Greenland's vast ice. She is also enticed by the ice itself, communal life, the land, and the dramatic ways with which Inuit culture deals with a nature it cannot dominate. Her own use of language sometimes approaches the poetic, which isn't so surprising when you learn that she's a poet, too. Using the specialized language of poetry, Erlich is able to render what might seem a static and frozen environment into one that lives and breathes on the page. She's at her best when she describes the physical world, whether populated by other humans at the time or only by 25 varieties of ice, snow, and the midnight sun. She does a good job, too, of delving into the lives of both exiled Danes and Greenlanders, and when she doesn't know something, she's not afraid to say so. More often than not, she finds out and lets the reader know. Sometimes, I found certain facts repeated and wasn't sure why. Not a huge deal, but distracting. Also, I would have liked to know a little more about the personal relationships Erlich cultivated on the island, although that wasn't the purpose of the book, and is almost a compliment, rather than a criticism, because I found her such an interesting person. Her aim was to view history, cultural observation and travel through her own prism, and to create a picture of Greenland that is simultaneously unique and universal and conveys the essence of the unlikely place she has come to love. If those are, in fact, her goals, Erlich succeeds.