Book review: 'Extreme North' by Bernd Brunner provides an interesting but incomplete cultural history
By Bernd Brunner, translated by Jefferson Chase; W.W. Norton & Co., 2022; 256 pages; $27.95.
Let us first define what this book isn’t: it’s not a cultural history of the North. Brunner himself acknowledges that what constitutes the North is, by virtue of geography, difficult to define. What seems self-evident to Alaskans — we live in the North, after all — is a different concept to a refugee from Guatemala, or whom “north” means nothing more than Texas.
Once Europeans set out to fill the voids in their maps, Brunner’s account picks up pace, and readers join a parade of explorers, maritime captains, naturalists and ultimately tourists who traveled north, tending to find what they were looking for. Which is to say, a north that reflected their desires for it.
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