| This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland Vintage Books Edition Contributor(s): Ehrlich, Gretel (Author) |
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ISBN: 0679758526 ISBN-13: 9780679758525 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group OUR PRICE: $20.90 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 2003 Annotation: For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In This Cold Heaven she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine. Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit have for ice, befriends a polar bear hunter, and comes to agree with the great Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that "all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes." This Cold Heaven is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Travel | Essays & Travelogues - History | Polar Regions - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social |
| Dewey: 998.200 |
| Physical Information: 1" H x 5.1" W x 7.9" (0.70 lbs) 400 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Arctic/Antarctic |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. In This Cold Heaven she combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine. Ehrlich unlocks the secrets of this severe land and those who live there; a hardy people who still travel by dogsled and kayak and prefer the mystical four months a year of endless darkness to the gentler summers without night. She discovers the twenty-three words the Inuit have for ice, befriends a polar bear hunter, and comes to agree with the great Danish-Inuit explorer Knud Rasmussen that "all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes." This Cold Heaven is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world. |