Product Description

A portrait of the Arctic that celebrates the landscape, wildlife and people of the vast and mysterious region. Above all, it is a story of light - solar and lunar rings, halos and coronas, the aurora borealis, and the distant mountain that is actually a looming and convincing mirage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81216 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 130 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The European picture of the Arctic is usually of snow and ice: the inhospitability of the terrain and the frigid wastes of the tundra contribute to our incapacity to imagine ordinary life there. In this magisterial book Barry Lopez draws on this hazy understanding of the far north to provide a compelling account of the land and its hold upon the psyche.

It is a book which could be compared to Chatwin's The Songlines for its combination of travelogue and poetic vision. Yet the beauty of the prose and the thought-provoking evocations of modern culture's shifting relationship with the environment are in a league of their own. Here are sparkling descriptions of the lives of caribou, muskoxen, polar bears and narwhals, and extraordinarily moving passages which meditate on the nature of our relationship with the world, the inter-dependence of ideas, desire and science and the possibility of dignity and compassion in the contemporary world.

It is a measure of the respect which Lopez has for his subject that his book exemplifies the supreme importance which he ascribes to the ethics of respect in the face of all existential paradox:

"There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light".

Review
Lopez eloquently describes four years of wanderings in the Arctic Circle, from Baffin Island to the Bering Sea. As his subtitle perhaps suggests, his writing is attenuated and overly metaphysical at times. For the most part, however, the high seriousness is a gamble that pays off. At its best, this is much more than a travel book. Like John McPhee, Lopez is a conservationist as well as an excellent writer. Unlike McPhee, Lopez is uninterested in anecdotes, seldom describing either his human companions or the technological support-systems that make his presence in such a remote and forbidding landscape possible. His most memorable descriptions are of animals: arctic foxes, migrating musk-oxen, sea-birds. Self-consciously rejecting a human-centered viewpoint, Lopez instead shows things as they might appear to the creatures them-selves. Of the whales hunted in Baffin Bay during the 19th century (38,000 were killed by the British fishing fleet alone; some 200 remain today), Lopez writes: "The blowhole. . .is so sensitive to touch that at a bird's footfall a whale asleep at the surface will start wildly. The fiery pain of a harpoon strike can hardly be imagined." He goes on to tell of a whale harpooned by the Truelove in 1856 - it dove 1,200 feet to the ocean floor in less than four minutes, breaking its neck and "burying its head eight feet deep in blue-black mud. "Lopez, then, affords no armchair escape from life's harsher realities. In the apparently unchanging landscape of the Arctic, he sees many signs of degeneration and loss. He quotes, for instance, anthropologists' estimates that 90% of the Eskimo population has died out since its first contact with European trappers and explorers in the 19th century (lack of immunity to such diseases as tuberculosis and diphtheria is the probable cause). While acutely receptive to beauty - whether a spectacular display of Northern Lights or an uneasy encounter with the beady eye of a vigilant ground-nesting bird - Lopez sees even such moments of "Hyperborean" calm as only respites from the encroachments of history and human expansion. This is a polemic, then - and at its best moments, something more. Combining his heightened, notably "literary" style with his objective desire to see things as they are from the viewpoint of his "primitive" or "wild" subject-matter, Lopez often succeeds in transmitting a unique and powerful vision. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
A portrait of the Arctic that celebrates the landscape, wildlife and people of the vast and mysterious region. Above all, it is a story of light - solar and lunar rings, halos and coronas, the aurora borealis, and the distant mountain that is actually a looming and convincing mirage.

Customer Reviews

Scientific but easy to read
This book gives you a great insight into the Arctic wilderness and the animals which habit it. There is a good level of scientific content but it is so well written that you don't tend to notice it, although it wouldn't really count as light reading because to get the most out of it you have to concentrate. But still an amazing book and well worth the effort.

Barry's Guidebook
This is not just a great book about the Artic, but a handbook for how to move through and observe wilderness and areas of unspoiled natural beauty. Lopez knows more about the interdependence of the human and natural worlds than any other writer I know.