This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland

ISBN-13:	9780679758525
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/07/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	210,469
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.93(d)
Age Range:	15 Years

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.