This Cold Heaven
Seven Seasons in Greenland
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group · Print & ebook · January 7, 2003
Greenland lies at the heart of Gretel Ehrlich’s decade-long fascination with landscape, culture, and survival.
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- Who it’s for
- Travel, history, and cultural anthropology bring Greenland’s people and elemental landscape vividly into view.
- Themes
- Greenlandic landscape and culture, Inuit life, Survival in the Arctic
- Pacing
- Mixed
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Start with this bookAbout this book
Greenland lies at the heart of Gretel Ehrlich’s decade-long fascination with landscape, culture, and survival. This Cold Heaven weaves travel, history, and cultural anthropology to bring the island’s people, terrain, and elemental beauty vividly to life, revealing an Arctic world rarely seen from within. “Thrilling. . . .
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A stunning portrait of a people and the landscape that shaped them.” –The New York Times Book Review 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.
At the Arctic Edge
Travel, history, and cultural anthropology bring Greenland’s people and elemental landscape vividly into view.
Come here for
- Greenland through the intertwined lenses of culture, terrain, and survival
- An intimate encounter with a rarely seen Arctic world
Expect
- A blend of travel, history, and cultural anthropology
- Adventure balanced with meditation on life in great solitudes
Where it sits
| Polar Travel | 85% |
|---|---|
| How Cultures Work | 40% |
| Travel Writing | 40% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Adventurers & Explorers
- How Cultures Work
- Travel Writing
- Authors
- Gretel Ehrlich
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- January 7, 2003
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Greenlandic landscape and culture · Inuit life · Survival in the Arctic
- Reading lane
- Adventurers & Explorers