This Cold Heaven
Seven Seasons in Greenland
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Word Count
100,000 words, Guess
Page Count
400 pages
Physical Format
Paperback
Identifiers
- Internet Archivethiscoldheavense0000ehrl
- ISBN-100679758526
- ISBN-139780679758525
- LibraryThing222143
- Goodreads112118
and 3 more
- OCLC Control Number51926415
- Better World Books9780679758525
- Open LibraryOL7700628M
Classifications
- LCCG743
- LCCG743 .E47 2003
Description
For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the men and women who long for and love the complex frailties and treacherous beauty of a world defined by ice. Greenland, the world's largest island, 840,000 square miles in extent, is covered by the largest continental ice sheet in the world. Her guide, her inspiration, her companion in spirit was the great Danish-Inuit explorer and ethnographer Knud Rasmussen. Between 1902 and his death in 1933 he launched seven expeditions: to record the unknown history and customs of the nomadic Eskimos; to chronicle the skills, beliefs, and crafts that made life in this climate possible and a matter of grace. For Rasmussen, "all true wisdom is only to be found far from the dwellings of man, in great solitudes." As she followed his trail, Ehrlich was to find the things that can open the mind to what is hidden from others. This Cold Heaven is at once a distillation of her many journeys, a path into a world divided into darkness and light and, finally, an attempt to capture the clarity that blinds us with surprise. - Jacket flap.
Description
In this travelogue, Ehrlich combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine. She 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. -- Publisher's description.
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Other Editions
- This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland
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