This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780679758525)

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.

Author: Gretel Ehrlich
ISBN-10: 0679758526
ISBN-13: 9780679758525
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Language: English
Published: 01/07/2003
Pages: 400
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 01/12/2003 pg. 20
Kliatt 05/01/2003 pg. 40