At the End of the World: Notes on a 1941 Murder Rampage in the Arctic and the Threat of Religious Extremism, Loss of Indigenous Culture, and Danger of Digital Life - Softcover

Millman, Lawrence

 
9781595349989: At the End of the World: Notes on a 1941 Murder Rampage in the Arctic and the Threat of Religious Extremism, Loss of Indigenous Culture, and Danger of Digital Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1595349987 ISBN 13: 9781595349989
Verlag: Terra Firma, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

In a remote corner of the Arctic in 1941, a meteor shower flashed across the sky for an unusually long time. Taking this to be a sign, one of the local Inuit proclaimed himself Jesus Christ. Another proclaimed himself God. Anyone who didn’t believe in them was Satan. Violence ensued.

At the End of the World isn’t just the remarkable story of a series of murders that occurred on the Belcher Islands, a group of wind-blasted rocks in Canada’s Hudson Bay. It’s also a starting place for a deeper cultural exploration. Against the backdrop of the murders, which highlight the fact that senseless violence in the name of religion is not a contemporary phenomenon and that a even people as seemingly peaceful as the Inuit can turn to chaos at the hands of one person’s delusion, Millman addresses the burgeoning dawn of the digital era, following the murders’ trail to show how our obsession with screens is not unlike a cult and offering a warning cry against the erosion of humanity and the destruction of the environment. The story becomes a confluence of the consequences of generational trauma, outside religious evangelism, systemic racism against indigenous people, the perilous passage from the natural to the digital world, and what it means to be human in a time of technological dominance and climate disasters.

At the End of the World, available for the first time in paperback, is not a straightforward tale of true crime but an examination of many of the issues that have become dominant in the global conversation. In snippets of reflection, Millman asks us to look north for answers to many of the questions we all hold, literally, in our hands.


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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Lawrence Millman is a writer, Arctic explorer, and mycologist who has made more than forty expeditions to the Arctic and subarctic. He has taught at the University of Iceland, the University of New Hampshire, Tufts University, and the University of Minnesota. His eighteen books include The Last Speaker of Bear, Last Places, At the End of the World, Fungipedia, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Hiking to Siberia, Northern Latitudes, and Goodbye, Ice. He has received a Guggenheim Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lowell Thomas Award. When not on the road or in the bush, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Journalist and podcaster Ryan Murdock is the author of Vagabond Dreams: Road Wisdom from Central America and editor-at-large (Europe) for Outpost, Canada’s national travel magazine. He shares his love of travel literature through book reviews focused on the classics and the Personal Landscapes podcast and writes regularly for the Shift, an independent Maltese news portal. He lives in Berlin.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

In my journeys North, I collect stories, and when I return home, I try to coax those stories on the paper. This coaxing may take a day, a week, or a month but eventually the story agrees to be written down.

Not so a particular tragedy that occurred in a remote area of Canada‘s Hudson Bay in 1941: it was elusive. recalcitrant, and perhaps even hostile to my efforts to put it on the paper. I want to remain obscure, it seems to be telling me.

Meanwhile, the president kept intruding on the past: "Hey," it would announce, "there’s been another terrorist attack." Or would say "Isn’t it time for another Google or two?" It would follow me from place to place like a predator in pursuit of its prey. "Download me!" it would demand.

I was in a quandary not even my old pals Charles Darwin, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Henry David Thoreau, hard as they tried, could provide me with any help. Nor was the unsurpassing strangeness of the Hudson Bay tragedy itself capable of assisting me.

At last, a so-called lightbulb went on in my head, and I realized I couldn’t write about the pass without also writing about the world immediately around me. In other words, the present. With this realization, I gave birth to the note you now holding in your hand...

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Verlag
Terra Firma
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1595349987
ISBN 13 
9781595349989
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
222
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Verantwortliche Person
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