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.

In this collection of essays, Stephen Watson turns to the writers who have endured for him; to the places that have formed him; and always to the nature of writing and literature itself. The range is remarkable: he moves from Leonard Cohen to Dante, from Albert Camus to Allen Ginsberg, not excepting Czeslaw Milosz and T.S. Eliot. Closer to home, there are essays on Robben Island and the meaning of the Cedarberg. More personally, movingly, a final section of the book returns to the site of a love affair, the birth of a daughter, and what it is that defines his native city, Cape Town. Whatever Watson touches on, he gives substance to the line from Pasternak that provides this collection with its title: 'the music in the ice'. In Watson's hands the essay form itself becomes an instance of that music. Here is a book that demonstrates again why Justin Cartwright has called Stephen Watson 'South Africa's foremost essayist'.

College Ruled Color Paperback. Size: 6 inches x 9 inches. 55 sheets (110 pages for writing). Ice In The Mountain. 157942978596

Based on the experience gained by the authors during the seminars, this work has been produced as a guide to those preparing for the essays required by the Professional Examination. It covers how to prepare, focuses on the engineer in the community, provides management topics, and concludes with a view on how the essays are judged and graded.

Color Paperback. Size: 6 inches x 9 inches. 82 sheets (164 pages for writing). Ice In The Sink. 156934294162