Jo Lendle

Seagull Books, in conjunction with City Lights and the Goethe Institut San Francisco present

Jo Lendle

reading from and speaking about

All The Land

by Jo Lendle

Translated by Katy Derbyshire

published by Seagull Books

How, in 1930, did Alfred Wegener, the son of minister from Berlin, find himself in the most isolated spot on earth, attempting to survive an unthinkably cold winter in the middle of Greenland? In All the Land, Jo Lendle sets out to chronicle Wegener’s extraordinary journey from his childhood in Germany to the most unforgiving corner of the planet.

As Lendle shows, Wegener’s life was anything but ordinary. Surrounded by children at the orphanage his parents ran, Wegener was driven by his scientific spirit in search not only of answers to big questions, but of solitude. Though Wegener’s life ended in tragedy during his long winter in Greenland, he left us with a scientific legacy: the theory of continental drift, mocked by his peers and only recognized decades after his death. Lendle gives us the story of this great adventurer, of the experiences that shaped him, resulting in a tale that is both thrilling and tender.

Jo Lendle is a German author and head of Hanser Verlag, Munich.

Seagull Books (estd 1982) has been crafting books with an eye to both exceptional content and radical design. What began as an instinctive and highly risky business of publishing books—books on theatre, visual arts, alternative cinema, philosophy, culture—continues to be a passionately felt need of the hour: manuscripts that need to see the light of day, to reach a readership, to stimulate minds, to change outlooks.

The Goethe-Institut is a non-profit German cultural association operational worldwide with 159 institutes, promoting the study of the German language abroad and encouraging international cultural exchange and relations. Around 246,000 people take part in these German courses per year.