SLED TRACKS

There's drama and excitement galore, and every single chapter ends with a kind of fact box that brings each topic fully up to date, so you can take one chapter at a time into our hectic, digital world — or do like me and get hooked and read it straight through. – Eleonora Johansen in the South Greenland newspaper Kujataamiu

A man doesn't need to own more than what can fit on a dogsled. But Ivars Silis is happy to shift things so there's room for you on board when he looks back over his shoulder at the sled tracks of his life. A thrilling zigzag, strewn with icicles and glinting with warmth and joy.

Silis's memoirs begin in a refugee camp on Amager and a series of merry Copenhagen adventures, before the young man, with an engineering degree in his pocket, flew to Greenland in 1964. After three years as a geophysicist he abandons the climate tables, loads his sled with a rifle and a camera and joins the Inuit polar-bear hunters. That became the start of a long career as a trapper, photographer and expedition leader in Arctic regions, but also with detours to warmer continents and to Latvia, where his roots lie.

In this book we meet some of his friends: big-game trappers, passionate biologists, daring pilots, cynical editors, crazy billionaires and panting walruses.

Greenland has been Silis's homeland for half a century, and he has experienced the whole dizzying development first-hand. Which path will Greenland choose now, as global warming melts the ice beneath the polar bear's paws and the world's largest island is firmly in the sights of the major powers?

Hardcover, 304 pages.