I blogged about this earlier tonight at Voices - if you haven't read the article you really need to take a moment or two to digest the whole thing. Over $1 billion wasted on New Orleans already due to no-bid contracts and work that was not done. It blows me away how corrupt our society has become. How could we possibly think that we will be able to help the Iraqis or Afghanis? We can not help ourselves, and even worse, clearly we do not really want to.

Hardly the sort of news one wants to read as the new year approaches.

I received Clare Dudman's One Day the Ice Will Reveal all its Dead for Christmas and as always I am mystified how authors come to find their subjects. Dudman's book is based on the life and research of Alfred Wegner, the man who coined the term Pangea for the supercontinent that once graced the planet and died in Greenland researching his theories. I read and reviewed for Booklist an outstanding nonfiction book about Wegner last year, Roger McCoy's Ending in Ice. I plan to include reviews of both books together in my next polar books survey (Spring of 2007 probably - there is one that is already written that will be up in the January issue of Eclectica).

My own interest in polar exploration came from disappointment - I wanted to pursue a graduate degree in history, primarily modern US military history but the Univ of AK does not have a graduate history program. I had become friends with the son of the Northern Studies Dept Head and through that friendship was pursuaded to enroll there. It was a very very small department (I imagine it still is) and I ended up writing and researching on aviation in AK for my thesis but along the way took many courses that included polar exploration and humans coming to and adapting to the North. (We did some Antarctica work as well but not much.) I am putting together a rough draft of a book proposal for a second AK book that is about some of my experiences in AK, and also largely about what I learned through my aviation work and research about why people go there - what they are all looking for. I understand why Alfred Wegner went to Greenland but can not for the life of me figure out why two modern authors have chosen to write about him at roughly the same time. (He died over fifty years ago.) How did they even know that Wegner existed, and what drew them to his complicated story of discovery and ice?

It is partly that age old question, "where do you ideas come from?" but with a certain twist. How do some authors plum history for such esoteric subjects and then craft entire books around them - how do they know where to look for what will hold their interest for so long? I have four other polar books waiting to be read behind Dudman's and I am so surprised by each of them. I wish I could gather all these authors in a room and sit back and listen to their research stories; listen to them tell us how they found dead explorers still calling out for more.