REVIEWS • 441
the men (and a few women) and machines behind the drift stations on either side of the geographic and ideological divides in the Arctic. I recommend the book, albeit with a few caveats. This is a popular history. Anyone looking for analysis and deep insight into superpower science in the Arctic will...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.660.4369 http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/article/download/203/236/ |
| Summary: | the men (and a few women) and machines behind the drift stations on either side of the geographic and ideological divides in the Arctic. I recommend the book, albeit with a few caveats. This is a popular history. Anyone looking for analysis and deep insight into superpower science in the Arctic will be disappointed; the book does not offer much detail about the many different scientific activities at drift stations, the scientific questions that were being addressed, the scien-tific and political rationale, the methods used and results obtained, and the immediate and longer-term significance of the data. The book would have benefited from the services of a good editor, as the prose is often turgid and repetitive. Rather than letting the facts speak for them-selves, the author sometimes tries too hard to inject a sense of adventure and excitement into the story. I grew tired of the overuse of the image of drift stations as rafts, particu-larly as rafting has a specific meaning in the context of sea-ice dynamics and mechanical thickening. There are avoidable errors. For example, the Polar Continental Shelf Project is first described (p. xi), correctly, as an agency within Energy, Mines and Resources Canada (Natural Resources Canada since 1995), but later (p. 180) incor-rectly, as part of Environment Canada. Notwithstanding these objections, polar history enthu-siasts will want to add this book to their collections. So, too, might Arctic (and perhaps even Antarctic) research-ers. It is not a textbook, but university professors in the Arctic natural and social sciences could recommend it to their graduate students to broaden their horizons and place their studies in a wider context. |
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