If you had to choose a new location for a crime series, where would you look? Michael Ridpath had to do just that. He chose Iceland, a country of fjords, glaciers and volcanoes, of long, manic summer days and long, sinister winter evenings, a place where everyone is on Facebook and everyone's grandmother has spoken to an elf. This is his account of researching the country: the breathtaking landscape, its vigorous if occasionally odd people, the great heroes and heroines of its sagas, and (of course) those troublesome elves; with a little bit thrown in about how to put together a good detective story. Entertaining and informative, it's a guide to Iceland for the visitor, and a guide to crime writing for the reader.

Between 1906 and 1918, anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson went on three long expeditions to the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic. He wrote voluminously about his travels and observations, as did others. Stefansson's fame was partly fueled by a series of controversies involving envious competitors in the race for public recognition. While many anthropological works refer to his writings and he continues to be cited in ethnographic and historical works on indigenous peoples of the North American Arctic, particularly the Inuit, his successes in exploration (the discovery and mapping of some of the last remaining land on earth) have overshadowed his anthropological work. Writing on Ice utilizes his extensive fieldwork diaries, now in Dartmouth's Special Collections, and contemporary photographs and sketches, some never before published, to bring to life the anthropology of the Arctic explorer. Gísli Pálsson situates the diaries in the context of that era's anthropological practice, early 20th-century expeditionary power relations, and the North American community surrounding Stefansson. He also examines the tension between the rhetoric of ethnography and exploration (the notion of the "friendly Arctic") and the reality of fieldwork and exploration, partly with reference to Stefansson's silence about his Inuit family.

When author Hazel Edwards was offered the chance to travel to Casey Base, on the Australian Antarctic Division resupply ship Polar Bird in the summer of 2001, little did she know that the three week roundtrip would become a feat of endurance when the ship was trapped in ice. Her diary reveals how her creativity was tested to the limit.

What are the real “basics” of writing, how should they be taught, and what do they look like in children’s worlds? In her new book, Anne Haas Dyson shows how highly scripted writing curricula and regimented class routines work against young children’s natural social learning processes. Readers will have a front-row seat in Mrs. Bee’s kindergarten and Mrs. Kay’s 1st-grade class, where these dedicated teachers taught writing basics in schools serving predominately low-income children of color. The children, it turns out, had their own expectations for one another’s actions during writing time. Driven by desires for companionship and meaning, they used available linguistic and multimodal resources to construct their shared lives. In so doing, they stretch, enrich, and ultimately transform our own understandings of the basics. ReWRITING the Basics goes beyond critiquing traditional writing basics to place them in the linguistic diversity and multimodal texts of children’s everyday worlds. This engaging work: Illustrates how scripted, uniform curricula can reduce the resources of so-called “at-risk” children.Provides insight into how children may situate writing within the relational ethics and social structures of childhood cultures. Offers guiding principles for creating a program that will expand children’s possibilities in ways that are compatible with human sociability. Includes examples of children’s writing, reflections on research methods, and demographic tables. “Dyson’s ethnographies offer new ways of thinking about writing time and remind us of the importance of play, talk, and social relationships in children’s literacy learning. If every literacy researcher could write like Dyson, teachers would want to read about research! If policymakers took her insights on board, classrooms might become more respectful and enjoyable spaces for literacy teaching and learning that soar way above the basics.” —Barbara Comber, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Shows how to maximize learning potential through an improved understanding and appreciation of the learning process. ICE represents the three stages of learning: Ideas; Connections; and Extensions.

This book offers the first in-depth corpus-based description of written Sri Lankan English. In comparison to British and Indian English, lexical and lexicogrammatical features of Sri Lankan English are analysed in a complex corpus environment comprising data from the respective components of the International Corpus of English, newspapers and online sources to explore the status of Sri Lankan English as a variety in its own right. The evolution of Sri Lankan English is depicted against the background of historical as well as sociolinguistic considerations and allows deriving a fine-grained model of the emergence of distinctive structural profiles of postcolonial Englishes developing in a multitude of norm orientations. This book is highly relevant to readers interested in Sri Lankan English and South Asian Englishes. It also offers more general sociolinguistic perspectives on the dynamics of postcolonial Englishes world-wide and on the inextricable link between language and identity.