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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Diamonds, David and Goliath, and the Dark Side of Geology, December 30, 2001
Barren Lands by Kevin Krajick is epic nonfiction without artifice. The author does not create straw heroes or villains, but presents the story and its participants warts and all. The search for diamonds in North America is the story, and myriad searchers enter and exit during the tale's almost 500 years. The ultimate discovery of the source of North America's diamonds in the Canadian Arctic is the goal of the story. Charles E. Fipke, a person who presents a lot of reasons for the reader to dislike him, is the unlikely David in the story and De Beers, the company with a stranglehold on the World's diamond markets, is the Goliath. Part of my interest in Barren Lands stems from my training as a geologist with an emphasis in mineral exploration. Part of the reason I became a high school earth science teacher has to do with my weakness at keeping scientific secrets. I knew that working for a mining or mineral exploration company would necessarily involve the nondisclosure of proprietary information and I knew that I couldn't do it. The tension between proprietary information and open scientific discourse is strongly portrayed in the book. Another reason for my interest comes from the fact that geology students of my generation were very aware of what these diamond deposits in North America should look like. I have been telling my 9th graders for years that somewhere in Canada there are some diamondiferous kimberlite pipes that have been glacially scoured and probably contain circular lakes, making them difficult to find. I have been telling them that someday someone would follow the diamonds in the glacial till covering northern North America back to the source of the diamonds. Barren Lands allowed me to enjoy the fact that at least one of the things I learned in college, and then passed on to my own students, was correct. I cannot recommend this book enough. If you have an interest in geology, exploration, history, nature, and economics, this book should keep you up late at night as you eagerly read the book to its conclusion. A special recommend to anyone interested in being an exploration or mining geologist. Some mining is necessary and mining is necessarily a destructive process. Mining resources like diamonds and gold present a large challenge to any environmentally oriented person since most of the money to be made on diamonds and gold is for luxury items, things humans could do without.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Diamonds, Danger, Desire, March 20, 2002
Did you know that in about half of the states of the US people have found diamonds? Diamonds of more than two carats have been found, for example, in Ohio and Alabama, and finding them is often just child's play. Kids are the ones who pick these gems up, because kids are close to the ground and always looking for treasures. Finding a reliable supply of diamonds is much more difficult; the ones found on the ground are often chance deposits that were dropped when a glacier melted, but the glacier must have carried them from somewhere rich in diamonds. There aren't many such places, and it was a surprise that over the past decade, the Northwest Territories of Canada were deemed to be diamond mining country. The eerie, exciting, and disturbing story of how this came to be is told in _Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic_ (Times Books) by Kevin Krajick. The lure of diamonds has proved inescapable for a certain class of men for centuries, and Krajick's book tells about some of them he met while he did his research. The Barren Lands (yes, that is the designation you will see on maps) is a half million square mile region as far north as Americans can go. There are no roads and no people, and it is called barren because it is above the northern limits which trees can reach, Since diamond exploration has started, however, it could well be populated with workers producing gold, uranium, and other minerals. At the heart of the story of exploration here is Chuck Fipke, a weird little guy who does nothing to improve the image of geologists. When Fipke was in charge of a prospecting expedition, he drove his men ruthlessly, especially his own son with distressing ferocity ("When you're not eating or sleeping, you're working for me."). Fipke was just one of a long line of explorers to the region, and their history is well covered here. The unbelievable hardships of traversing the area, or working in it, are well described in many sections of the book; bears, mosquitoes, and deerflies all supply annoyance or danger. Then there were the people. Fipke could not keep his operation secret for long, and DeBeers and other mining firms shouldered in. Fipke's team painted the plywood cubicles that held the drills with camouflage paint that would prevent detection from the air, and even ordered army-surplus camouflage nets to cover supplies. This was not paranoia; there were commercial spy planes making regular flights to see what was up. The prospectors faced challenges from the environmentalists, who worried that the caribou, wolves, falcons, wolverines, and bears would get shoved aside by the industrialization of a previously pristine area, and the local tribes worried about water pollution, looting of artifacts left by their ancestors, and "perhaps most of all they worried that they might be left out of the profits." Barren Lands now has a hugely expensive mining factory, and will simply churn out millions of dollars worth of diamonds every year. There is a pressure to build roads and power lines to the site, which will mean more alteration of a basically natural area, but profits like these cannot be resisted. While Fipke and his partners are all now unimaginably rich, they are not unimaginably happy. Fipke alienated many of his crew, and shattered his family during the most intense of the mining preparations. He admits that putting all his energy into his mine had its price. "But that was _cool_! To do all that we did? It was _fun_!" It is not surprising that with this attitude, all the riches and all the family problems haven't made a difference: he is still out there looking for the next strike.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Thrilling Read, November 1, 2001
Geology is not usually one of my favorite topics. I remember slogging through John McPhee's interminable series of articles for The New Yorker and vowing to avoid the topic at all costs. My attitude has changed radically since reading Kevin Krajick's book Barren Lands. Somehow, he has managed to convert a dry topic into a thrilling adventure narrative, weaving hundreds of years of history into this story about the idiosyncratic characters who prospect for diamonds. I highly value my sleep, but I actually stayed up late to finish this book. My only criticism is that I would have liked to see photographs of the driven, eccentric characters that populate the book, and the actual landscape they prospected.
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