True North (Journeys into the Great Northern Ocean)

From the fiords of northern Labrador to the ice fields of western Greenland, from the outports of Newfoundland to the tiny fishing villages of Iceland and the Faroe Isles, bestselling author and lifelong sailor Myron Arms chronicles the experience of two-and-a-half decades of voyaging into some of the most remote destinations on Earth.

Presented as a series of sixteen personal essays, True North is at once a tale of white-knuckled adventure, a celebration of natural places, and a quest for contact with the planet we live on. The first five essays explore the motives of the author and those who sail with him on their first forays into the summer Atlantic. The next six essays evoke the allure of northern landscapes—the challenges of a stormy night at sea, the uncanny light of the Arctic sun at midnight, the pathos of pilot whales being driven to slaughter. The final five essays explore the geology, the archeology, the biochemistry, and the natural history of these same northern landscapes, broadening and universalizing their meaning until they become windows into the complex workings of the planet itself.

Thought-provoking and environmentally savvy, True North expresses one man’s fierce determination “to encounter the natural world, to live deliberately within it, to strive to minimize one’s footprint upon it, and to bear witness to it before it is altered irretrievably—before it is lost.”