A review by late_stranger
Between Weathers: Travels in 21st Century Shetland by Ron McMillan

4.0

I'm ambivalent about the nature writing shelf for this book, because it is more of a general, people-and-history type travel book, but the place features strongly enough that I'm willing to make the categorization. McMillan is a really thorough observer, which causes me to forgive his occasional sins (some incidental, boring misogyny directed out at celebrities rather than at people he directly encounters and some weird but also incidental apologetics for Britain's colonial projects). An interesting nuance of the book is that Shetland is sustained (and has been for a long time) by some problematic through to pretty evil industries, and the ethics of those industries (commercial fishing, whaling, military outposts, and oil) are not abstract - they're integral to lifeline jobs for whole communities, and the people who have those jobs have really interesting relationships to them, which sometimes are addressed head on and sometimes only obliquely. Overall I was quite impressed.