Awesome Arctic: Booktalk 3

Even though fourteen-year-old Alika hasn’t been a teenager for long, he’s an accomplished Inuit seal hunter, and he his family live about as close as humans live to the North Pole in 1868. Seal hunting is a way of life to the Inuit people, and Alika and his younger brother, Sulu, have traveled to the edge of a thick ice floe which is attached to land. It’s the time of the long winter darkness, and Alika and Sulu have come by ice sledge led by their dogs. Their lead sledge dog, Jamka, has sniffed out a seal hole, and Alika sees his chance to wait for the seal to pop up to the surface and provide them with the food they so badly need for the long, dark, frigid winter. But Alika is starting to push his luck: it looks as if a gale is coming, and their village of Nunatak is seven miles away. Alika’s ancestors have been living in this neck of the woods for thousands and thousands of years, and all children are taught to hunt, to build iglus, to predict the thickness of ice over water, to fight off polar bear attacks, and to survive sub-zero weather. If they’re not taught this at a young age, they’ll die. Remember: the Arctic is a formidable foe. It has lots of tricks up its sleeve, and it had one trick that Alika did not see coming: ice floes can break away from the land they’ve attached themselves to. They’re like big ice rafts, basically, and Alika watches in horror as he and his young brother and their dogs are suddenly adrift at sea, all alone on an ice floe: Ice Drift by Theodore Taylor.

Ice Drift by Theodore Taylor. 224 p. Harcourt, 2005. Booktalk to intermediate grades, middle school, even early high school.

Awesome Arctic: Booktalk 2

You have to be really, really tough -- physically and mentally -- to want to reach the North Pole, especially if you did it the old-fashioned way [by boat, dog sled, and your own two feet], as African-American explorer Matthew Henson did. Matthew Henson had always been a determined, adventurous young man. When he was only 13 years old, he walked forty miles completely on his own to Baltimore in order to get a job. He discovered that he loved sailing, adventure, and travel. When he met a young naval lieutenant named Robert Edwin Peary in 1887, it would change his life. He traveled with Peary to the jungles of Nicaragua, and later they started traveling to the Arctic. Explorers tend to dream big, and Robert Peary was no exception. He wanted to be the first man to reach the North Pole, and he asked Henson to come along and be his assistant. This began years of their working as a team to reach the pole. Peary was lucky to have such a brave and loyal helper. Henson gave up much of his life and his personal safety to accompany Peary on these long, often fruitless expeditions. During one, Henson had gone ahead. He was fairly close to the Pole, but he was on thin ice, and he and his dogs plunged into the icy water. If Henson had not been pulled out by a native Inuit man who had accompanied them, he would have died. Peary never wanted to give up, because he was in competition with another man, Dr. Frederick Cook, to be the first man to reach the true North Pole. Eventually, Peary was declared the winner, but sadly enough, Matthew Henson did not receive much credit or glory at the time for his help in the victory. Happily, some of that has been rectified today. Read more about this fascinating man, Matthew Henson, in Onward: a Photobiography of African-American Polar Explorer Matthew Henson by Dolores Johnson.

Onward: a Photobiography of African-American Polar Explorer Matthew Henson by Dolores Johnson. 64 p. National Geographic Society, 2006. Booktalk to intermediate, middle school, even high school.

Awesome Arctic: Booktalk 1

Imagine traveling to the North Pole, a land where nothing is permanent except the seabed far below the ice itself. The air is 15 degrees below zero, and it is completely dark six months out of the year. Unlike the South Pole, the North Pole doesn’t have permanent research stations and scientists living there year round. In many ways, the North Pole is trickier, sneakier, and more mysterious than the South Pole. It seems to have more secrets which are harder to uncover. That’s why the New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin visited the North Pole and wrote this book. He’s an environmental reporter and the first Times reporter to file stories directly from the North Pole. It’s pretty amazing what he went through to get there. It can take days in small planes landing on obscure, icy runways. You have to wear huge, bulky clothing and spend a lot of time sitting around waiting. When you get there, during the daylight months, the sun is blinding, the air is frigid, and you can forget about taking showers. You lose all sense of time because it’s perpetual daylight. Only bring pencils, because pens will freeze up, and you won’t be able to write. Revkin explores many of the mysteries of the North Pole: why the magnetic field there is always shifting; how global warming could massively change the North Pole; and why so many explorers have died trying to get to the Pole. I loved The North Pole Was Here by Andrew C. Revkin.

The North Pole Was Here: Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World by Andrew C. Revkin. 128 p. Kingfisher, 2006. Booktalk to intermediate grades, middle school, even high school.