I am sorry but i simply did not goet into this book. as a history of what happened it may or may not be accirate, however as a novel it failed for me, failed to hold my interest, mainly I failed to understand the main character

I loved this book. First, the writing was beautiful when describing the terrifying and wonderful arctic ice, and the struggles of the scientists to conquer it. Second, the story of Alfred Wegener's life is fascinating. He was a German scientist in the early 1900s who made important contributions to ballooning, meteorology, climate, rain, and developed a theory of how craters were formed on the moon. He also was the first to put forth the theory of Continental Drift, which evolved into Plate Tectonics. He was an arctic explorer, spending several years on the glaciers of Greenland. The novel also describes his service in the army during World War I, and his family. ( )

I'm usually not a great fan of US retitlings of UK books (think back to Christopher Priest's novel set in Hardy country, A Dream of Wessex, which in the US became The Perfect Lover), but in this instance I gave a cheer when I discovered on the copyright page that the original UK title had been Wegener's Jigsaw. Hellish emotive, wot?

To say this is a biographical novel about Alfred Wegener, the meteorologist/glaciologist who, in the early part of the 20th century, was the first to formulate and champion a coherent theory (or, really, hypothesis) of continental drift, would be accurate but somewhat misleading. Usually one expects a biographical novel to have somewhat the same structure as a biography, but Dudman has eschewed this approach to adopt one that's far more interesting and which gives the book an affect almost of magic realism. The novel starts with Wegener's death on the Greenland ice. What follow are countless smallish, roughly chronological sections narrated by Wegener himself seemingly as a representation of his-whole-life-flashed-before-him as he waits to die. Dudman/Wegener calls these items memory beads, and that seems as good a descriptive term as any. Jigsawed together in one's mind as one reads, they build up a picture of Wegener as a highly appealing, passionate personality; whether they succeed as a biographical account for the reader unfamiliar with the bare bones of Wegener's life is another matter, and one that I confess didn't occur to me -- so enchanted was I by Dudman's telling -- until afterwards.

A major additional joy is that Dudman names some of the now mainly forgotten scientists who, for reasons largely of hideboundedness (even though the complaint that Wegener could produce no plausible mechanism for drift was a fair one), so steadfastly rejected his hypothesis. Despite the historical reality that it wasn't until long after Wegener's death that these numbskulls -- or at least the surviving ones -- got their comeuppance, when the 1960s discovery of the phenomenon of seafloor spreading not only provided a mechanism for drift but (almost) dictated that the continents had to drift, still one feels that the naming of names here offers some kind of justice to the man's memory.

In short, if you want a ripping yarn (Gabriel Hunt and the Secret of the Earth's Plates?), look elsewhere; but, if you want an absorbing and for the most part beautifully written narrative that unveils a bit of science's history that's perhaps too often overlooked, this is the book for you. ( )

A beautiful and fascinating book about arctic exploration, this is a fictionalized bio of an actual scientist who was interested in many fields related to weather, the Arctic, plate tectonics, et al. It's also a thoughtful book on the process of science and thinking and experimentation, as well as being a wonderful narrative about adventure as well as family relations. ( )

FYI, this book is also under the (much better and more evocative, IMHO) title One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead!

Read more reviews there--it's a wonderful book. ( )