Kamchatka got your tongue?

Ever wonder if those National Geographic articles get Ordinary People going to the ends of the earth? Diana Gleadhill read one in 1994 about an end of the earth in eastern Siberia and now the former librarian from County Down, Ireland, is the author of “Kamchatka: A Journal & Guide to Russia’s Land of Ice and Fire” (Odyssey/W.W. Norton, 312 pp., $24.95). Gleadhill and her friend Elise relish the wilderness, the wildlife, the volcanoes, the natives, the exotic landscapes of a place closed to visitors for decades during the Cold War (Kamchatka is a peninsula north of Japan). The book is full of vivid photographs and maps and archival material from Russia and the United Kingdom and Australia, delicately drawn representations of the settlements and the natives' habitations from centuries ago, along with essays on geology and culture and history by specialists in the fields. This is a woman who explores volcanic hillsides and also brings “my wee foam mattress everywhere,’’ who after her sauna sits outside her room, watching for bears. Not such an ordinary person, of course, but with the talent to make a more ordinary person believe she could go to Kamchatka, too. Perhaps with a wee bigger mattress.