Amazon.com description: Product Description: To outsiders the Arctic is a region that is both real and imagined. The Last Imaginary Place depicts a world that is the cherished homeland of many small northern societies, as well as an environment that southerners have viewed as fascinating, terrifying, and overwhelmingly alien. The book is informed by a sense of history as a process that explains how the arctic came to be as it is, as well as how it came to be imagined by those who live to the south. It observes the flaws in the image that the south has created of the north. It argues that the peoples of the Arctic are not isolated and unchanging relics of an antique past, and that the Arctic has a human history that is as long and complex as that of most other regions of the world. The author paints a vivid portrait of the Arctic through its history, from the Ice Age to the movement of Viking farmers across the North Atlantic islands, to the long and arduous searches for sea-passages to the north of Asia and America. We meet fur traders who pioneered European expansion across the northern forests of Canada and Siberia, the whalers and ivory-hunters who ravaged northern seas, patriotic explorers racing to reach the North Pole, and the northern peoples who observed it all while attempting to better their own lives. The demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, combined with advanced transportation and communication technologies and the growth of aboriginal rights movements, has brought a new era to the Arctic world. Troubled with social problems, economic insecurity and questions of environmental change, the region looks to the new millennium with apprehensive hope. This is a comprehensive, enlightening look at one of the most culturally rich and fascinating areas of the world.