September 1, 2022
German historian Brunner's (Taming Fruit) latest work is a riveting survey of the intellectual and cultural history of "The North." Broadly exploring events from prehistory to the present, Brunner also crisscrosses a wonderfully diverse number of disciplines, including geography, climatology, literature and folklore, and political sociology. Beginning with the concept of the "North," Brunner focuses on the Arctic Region: the North Pole, Scandinavia, Greenland, Iceland, Russia, and Canada. In an academic but engaging tone, Brunner describes how the lore of the North was often shaped by people who never actually visited the region and how it is often difficult to distinguish actual events from mythologization and appropriation. Brunner shows how some tried to use the North and its people to further the concept of a superior white race while marginalizing other groups like Jewish and Inuit people. VERDICT Jonathan Yen's confident delivery and masterful pronunciations of the many non-English terms draw listeners into Brunner's descriptions of the almost magical beauty of the far North, while his expressive readings of the racist and pseudoscientific perversions of the region (by Nazis and other white supremacists) will stay with listeners long after the audiobook has ended.--Beth Farrell
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
November 29, 2021
Historian Brunner (Taming Fruit) explores “the North” as a place “both real and imaginary” in this captivating and wide-ranging account. He notes that ancient Greeks and Romans viewed the North as “a realm of cold and darkness, devoid of sunlight and inimical to life,” and documents how histories of the fall of Rome and ninth-century Viking attacks on Constantinople and Paris gave rise to the image of Nordic peoples as “fearsome barbarians.” Explorers’ accounts and trade in cod, whale blubber, amber, and other commodities gradually changed the image of the North, and in the 18th- and 19th-century, many German and English poets, composers, and philosophers came to view the North as an “imagined homeland.” (William Morris, a leader of the arts and crafts movement, went so far as to teach himself Icelandic.) Brunner also delves into 18th-century Scottish poet James Macpherson’s Works of Ossian, which he falsely attributed to a “third-century Scottish bard,” and French novelist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s racist ideas about the “Aryan” north, which helped fuel anti-Semitism in Europe and the U.S. Erudite yet accessible, and packed with intriguing arcana, this cultural history fascinates.