Review of So You Want to Own Greenland?: Lessons from the Vikings to Trump by Elizabeth Buchanan

Just because you’re an expert doesn’t mean you can write a popular political science book…. That, unfortunately, is the lesson I take away from So You Want to Own Greenland?: Lessons from the Vikings to Trump. Elizabeth Buchanan is nominally an expert in polar geopolitics. However, her book about the contentious history of Greenland’s settlement and sovereignty is anything but interesting. I received an eARC from NetGalley and publisher Melville House in exchange for a review.

Reader, this book is boring. It shouldn’t be; Buchanan makes a concerted effort to write in a conversational style with a tone that is outright sarcastic at times. She takes potshots at everyone from the Americans (she really wants you to know she isn’t one) to the Danes to the Vikings. I admit to finding her description of Erik the Red as “Ed Sheeran’s head, with a lush siren-red full beard, atop André the Giant’s body” somewhat humorous. However, this sense of humour is detrimental at times to a serious analysis of Greenland’s history and politics. For example, not a few pages later, Buchanan handwaves away Erik the Red’s death:

Not so much for Erik. Erik the Red died in about AD 1003, from something unbefitting a man of his stature or reputation—he simply fell off a horse. Or caught a virus from new Viking settlers. Both stories feature in the history books.

Wikipedia gives me a better summary than this. For a book from someone with a PhD, I’d expect slightly more in-depth research.

Now, maybe I’m being too harsh—Buchanan’s PhD is in Russian Arctic strategy, so maybe Norse history is a bit too much of a stretch. Cool, cool. But even once we get closer to the modern era, this book is sorely lacking rigour. Buchanan passes off a lot of personal opinion as if it’s a foregone conclusion—and while I am willing to grant she knows more about this area than me, I’d like to see more actual analysis instead of just “take me word for it.” There are endnotes, but most of them point to government documents and news reports, not academic articles about these topics.

In short, despite its author’s pedigree, this book doesn’t seem soundly researched or presented to me. And yet, when Buchanan digs in and actually tries to do analysis, that conversational tone runs up against her penchant for detail and jargon. For example, she breaks down the report of a commission about Greenlandic independence section by section in stultifying detail that is at odds with the summarizing, wise-cracking approach at the start of the book.

Indeed, one wonders what the original publication schedule of this book was and whether it might not have been pushed up to capitalize on Trump’s “buying Greenland” malarkey from March of this year. Obviously this book was in the works prior to that, with its subtitle getting a glow-up. I won’t lie—Trump’s comments were why the title of this book caught my eye when I was browsing NetGalley. At the same time, Buchanan has a point: Trump or not, Greenland is clearly an important place in the next fifty years of Arctic interactions.

Alas, if like me you came looking for something that would fill you in on Greenlandic history and politics, you might be disappointed. I mean, this book kind of does that. But I derived zero enjoyment from reading it and found it pretty boring—if you were looking for a book to convince you that reading about geopolitics can be fun, this isn’t it.