This Cold Heaven Paperback by Gretel Ehrlich

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage (2003-01-07)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 400 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780679758525
• Item Weight: 351.91 grams
• Dimensions: 8.0 x 5.2 x 0.93 cm

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.

About the Author

Gretel Ehrlich is the author of A Match to the Heart, among other works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She divides her time between California and Wyoming.