Sara Wheeler loves cold places. More than a decade ago, she published her classic travel book, Terra Incognita, about the vast, empty continent of Antarctica, which changed the way many people saw the place. But for years, she says, she avoided writing about the Arctic because it seemed too compromised. Now, however, she’s taken on the subject, and in Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), she wrestles with a place more populous, more complex, and more troubled than its southern counterpart.

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