Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic | 
 enlarge | Author: Kevin Krajick
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 576269
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0805071857
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9780805071856
ASIN: 0805071857
Publication Date: October 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In the late 1970s, two men set out on what would prove to be a twenty-year quest to find a North American gem mine, along a fabled path that had defied sixteenth-century explorers, Wild West fortune seekers, and modern geologists. They are an unlikely pair: Chuck Fipke, a ragged fanatical prospector with a singular talent for finding sand-size mineral grains, and Stew Blusson, an ultra-tough geologist and helicopter pilot. Inventive, eccentric, and ruthless, they follow a trail of clues left by predecessors-and a few actual gems-all the way from backwoods Arkansas up the glaciated high Rockies into the vast and haunted barren lands of northern Canada. With a South African geochemist's secret weapon, Fipke and Blusson outwit rivals, including the immense De Beers cartel, and make one of the world's greatest diamond discoveries-setting off a stampede unseen since the Klondike gold rush.
Barren Lands offers an unforgettable journey for those who, in the words of a nineteenth-century trapper, "want to see that country before it is all gone."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 21 more reviews...
 Real life adventure March 11, 2008
This is a true story, but reads like a novel. It is about the search for diamonds in northern Canada on a low budget. They follow one lead, that doesn't work, they follow another lead. They spy on the competition, the competition spies on them. They play tricks to mislead the competition, and eventually succeed in their quest. Parts of the book are hilarious.
Great Read July 27, 2007
Very well written and informative. I learned alot about both the diamond business and the great Canadian North by reading this book. Very entertaning.
One of the most memorable books I have read May 15, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It has been a number of years since I bought and read Barren Lands. Although I greatly enjoyed the book while I read it, I appreciate it even more now because it has left me with many vivid memories of tales told in the book and with knowledge about diamonds and geology that I would not have known otherwise. The book is more multi-dimensional, and works on more levels than almost any other book touching on Geology that I have read. In this multi-dim respect, I think it actually exceeds John McPhee's Rising from the Plains - which is quite a feat. What do I mean by multi-dimensional? Here are some examples that are still bouncing around in my mind years after reading Barren Lands:
1.) The impression that is left of the Australian Mining Company BHP Billiton: I am left impressed by the way they kept their feelers out in this fringe community of explorers, and nutured a relationship with Fipke and Blusson until they found the first paydirt. (Way to go Hugo!) If one bought stock in BHP soon after this book came out, one would have probably recovered hundreds of times the books price in appreciation.
2.) Fipke: I suspect that if he were growing up today in USA public schools, he would be first diagnosed with some kind of attention-deficit disorder, pumped full of Ritalin and then finally jailed when he would inevitably fail to be successfully hammered into servile, abject mediocrity. I think there is a huge lesson here for academia: STOP measuring people with standardized tests, and figure out a way to help each person find his or her own, particular intellectual fire the way Fipke did.
3.) The endgame just before the discovery of the first pipe under the frozen lake. The cash is gone, winter is closing in, competitors with megabucks are catching on, and Canadian laws require you to divulge your secret the moment you make your discovery.... Such unlikely reality and so wonderfully told.
4.) Death in the wilderness: lightning bolts and helo crashes. If it were fiction, people would criticise it for being unbelievable.
5.) Black flies.
6.) Shooting stars and prophecies.
Much more. What a great and memorable book.
A great read but.... March 10, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A really well crafted book with some flowing prose but... there is an element of 'faction' about this book. The author takes literary license to the extreme by describing in detail events he never witnessed and although it might make for great fiction, it made me wonder just how much of the book's narrative is at best exaggeration, at worse pure fabrication.
But I thought the geological details in the book were well explained and the one lasting impression that I was left with was just how boringly methodical, time consuming and repetitive prospecting for diamonds really is, no matter how colorful and larger than life you make the people doing it.
Great Adventure Read December 24, 2006
Barren Lands is one of the great adventure reads. A bit slower and less gripping than Krakauer, but a great read.
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