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This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland Paperback – January 7, 2003
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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.
- Print length377 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 7, 2003
- Dimensions5.19 x 1 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100679758526
- ISBN-13978-0679758525
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Told by a voice in love with the light and ice and rippling, infinite beauty of the Arctic north. This Cold Heaven boldly captures the unyielding beauty and spontaneous wonders of life on the icecap.” —The Boston Globe
“Ehrlich has accomplished an extraordinary feat: she has taken a forbiddingly beautiful, haunting and alien landscape and depicted it in equally beautiful and haunting prose.” –Seattle Times
“Gripping. [A] realm of gemlike icebergs, yowling sled dogs, writhing aurora borealis and stalwart, wisecracking hunters.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Haunting and reflective . . . captures the essence of the Artic.” –Portland Oregonian
“Compelling. . . . At once an engaging history of the Inuit . . . and an affectionate profile of Ehrlich’s Greenlandic friends and their vanishing way of life.” –National Geographic
“Her adventures are wonderfully enlightening about the world way above the treeline. She writes beautifully.” –The Washington Times
“No one who reads this wonderful book will ever forget these singular people or the austerities of the land they inhabit.” –Thomas McGuane
“Get Ehrlich on a sled racing across unknown ice and she’ll carry you bodily into another place and time, another fast-disappearing way of life.” –Ann Jones, The Women’s Review of Books
“A lyrical blend of travel, meditation and history . . . [and] a hymn to the Inuit people’s rootedness in landscape and tradition.” —Times Literary Supplement
“[Ehrlich’s] does a masterful job of creating a nuanced sense of place.”–Conde Nast Traveler
From the Inside Flap
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.
From the Back Cover
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
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Darkness Visible:
Uummannaq, Greenland, 1995
Our country has wide borders; there is no man born has travelled round it. And it bears secrets in its bosom of which no white man dreams. Up here we live two different lives; in the Summer, under the torch of the Warm Sun; in the Winter, under the lash of the North Wind. But it is the dark and cold that make us think most. And when the long Darkness spreads itself over the country, many hidden things are revealed, and men's thoughts travel along devious paths.
-Blind Ambrosius
"Do you see that coming?" the old woman Arnaluaq asked.
"What?"
"That-out there over the sea. It is the Dark coming up, the great Dark!"
-Knud Rasmussen
The glaciers are rivers, the sky is struck solid, the water is ink, the mountains are lights that go on and off. Sometimes I lie in my sleeping bag and recite a line from a Robert Lowell poem over and over: "Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise."
I sleep by a cold window which I've opened a crack. Frigid air streams up the rock hill and smells of minerals. In a dream I hear the crackling sound that krill make under water. Earlier in the day the chunk of glacier ice I dropped into a glass of water made the same sound.
The ice came from the top of a long tongue that spills out at the head of this fjord, as if it were the bump of a tastebud that had been sliced off, or a part of speech. Now it has melted and looks floury, like an unnecessary word that adds confusion to insight. But when I drink it down, its flavor is bright, almost peppery, bespeaking a clarity of mind I rarely taste but toward which I aspire.
This January morning a sundog-a rainbowlike ring around the sun-loomed so large it seemed to encircle the visible world. As I moved, it moved. I watched it slide across something stuck: a ship that had frozen into the ice of Frobisher Bay. I was taking off from Iqaluit, a town in Arctic Canada where I'd been stranded for several days. As my plane taxied out onto the runway, the sundog billowed and shuddered, dragging itself across black ice, too heavy to leave the ground. Then the plane did rise and so did the sun's halo-a bright porthole into an Arctic winter's permanent night.
Some Eskimos say such a ring around the sun represents the hand drum used by a shaman to invoke other worlds. They believe there are multiple realms within this one located beneath the sea ice, inside the mountains, at the edge of the ice cap, and up in the sky where other kinds of beings live and interact with us. Some are half human and half animal; some are transparent-pure spirit. Stories are regarded as living things, and the shaman's trance is brought on by the beating of the drum and the slow strobe of seasonal darkness and light.
My plane from Baffin Island to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, had made an unscheduled, early-morning departure. Every seat but two held strapped-in cargo; the steward and I were the only passengers. It was 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, made colder by a hard northwesterly wind. In the cabin we wrapped ourselves in wool blankets and sipped coffee while a mechanic swept snow from the wings. As the plane rose, it passed through the wavering hoop and the sun dog broke.
Below, Baffin Bay was a puzzle that had been shattered. There were disks, plates, slicks, crystals, frazil ice, grease ice, and pancake ice-Arctic lily pads across which seals, polar bears, and hunters leaped. Between tiny islands, broad sheets of ice as big as billboards bumped up into frozen Hiroshige-like waves.
People always ask, Why do you want to go north in the dark time of year? There's nothing up there. But Greenlanders know the opposite is true: "Summer is boring. Nothing for the dogs to do. In winter and spring the fjords and bays are ice. We go for long trips on our sleds-hunting every day, living wherever we want, and visiting friends in villages. That's when we are happy."
Below we flew over an intricate labyrinth of floating plinths. Clouds increased, light waned, yet it was morning. A glow marked the spot where the sun was trying to rise, but we veered north, away from it. Behind us, in the mountains, a river's fast-moving riffles had frozen in place. Everywhere the shifting ice was saffron, then pink, then indigo-the Arctic's austerity both a physical clarity and a voluptuousness.
The hunters I was to travel with said the dogsled trip to Thule would take a month or longer. Imaqa. Maybe. Clocks and calendars were still considered irrelevant in the far north, where there were no roads, only frozen fjords and seas traveled by dogsled, where weather metered out time in its own currency, where, in one Eskimo dialect, the word for "winter" also means "a year." Up here, the ephemeral is the only constant; time has not been decimated by the second hand, itself a foreign splinter looking to rejoin the living tree from which it came.
Two years earlier, in 1993, on a similar flight, I had met a young couple, Ann and Olejorgen, who befriended me. Now I was returning to Greenland to spend part of an Arctic winter with them before taking off by dogsled for places north.
Olejorgen is Inuit but born in Nuuk, the capital city below the Arctic Circle, and Ann is a Faroe Islander who had immigrated to Greenland years before. They were on their way home to Uummannaq, a small town on a tiny island halfway up the west coast of Greenland. When they asked what a lone American was doing on the plane, I held up a thick volume by Knud Rasmussen, one of ten compendiums of ethnographic notes from one of his expeditions. Half Inuit, half Danish, Rasmussen had made a three-and-a-half-year epic journey by dogsled
in an effort to trace the Eskimos' original migration route from Siberia to Greenland. On the way, he recorded their material and cultural
history-including firsthand accounts of how they traveled, lived, and hunted, their shamanic rituals, songs, dreams, drawings, and stories-without which we would know very little about the Greenland, Netsilik, Caribou, Copper, Mackenzie, and Alaskan Eskimos as they lived a hundred years ago.
Olejorgen was surprised that I knew about Rasmussen. Dark-skinned and almond-eyed, he had a slow, soft voice and enough Danish blood mixed into what he called his Eskimo genes to make him tall. Those genes linked him by blood to Rasmussen through one of Greenland's most famous families.
"It's because of Rasmussen that I am going north to live," Olejorgen said. He had never been that far up the coast, never driven a dogsled, never used a harpoon, never killed a seal. "I have quit law school and want to learn to be a hunter. I am an Eskimo. Now I shall learn how to be one."
"Rasmussen . . . ya . . . he is the national hero," Ann said. Buxom and voluable, she spoke in a loud voice, switching effortlessly between Danish, English, Faroese, and Greenlandic-a boon for me since I am a shy traveler. Now she was sorting through a huge bag of presents from Denmark. She was both a collector and a giver, constantly transforming what might have become avarice into unstinting generosity. As a social worker in charge of a regional orphanage and halfway house for children in Uummannaq, giving was a way of life for her. "My family in the Faroe Islands was wealthy. Shipping . . . that's why my professors at university said I wouldn't be good at my job. But I told them that if I'd never known love, how could I give it?"
Ann was returning to Uummannaq with her new companion. She'd met Olejorgen during her sabbatical in Copenhagen and became pregnant with his child. Olejorgen was following her to Uummannaq-a place in Greenland he had never seen, but which for five years had been her adopted home.
When we climbed out of the Twin Otter at Nuuk, I'd found I had no money-no Danish kroner, that is-and there was no place to change currency. The thick volumes by Rasmussen proved to be the only currency I needed: Ann had insisted I come with them to Olejorgen's parents' house.
We sped into Nuuk, Greenland's capital city, in a Toyota pickup-taxi. It was pouring rain. Well below the Arctic Circle, Nuuk has no dogsleds, only apartment buildings, a hotel, a museum of Eskimology, and the House of Parliament. Greenland, a Danish overseas administrative division, gained limited independence in 1979 and is now governed by home rule.
Olejorgen's parents, Motzflot and Maritha Hammekin, were in their late seventies and spoke no English. Greenlandic is an Eskimo language, and is the first language of Greenland. Motzflot was a pale-skinned vicar with a gentle voice and keen eyes. Olejorgen's mother was small and dark, slightly stooped but with thick strong hands. As she took the
volumes from my arms, she told me she was related to Rasmussen through a Polish-Jewish-Danish-Greenlandic family named Fleischer. She wanted to show me the treasures she and her husband collected during their travels throughout Greenland. The small rooms were filled with soapstone and walrus ivory carvings and paintings of ice-choked fjords. On the dining room wall behind the vicar's seat hung the long tusk of a narwhal.
West Greenland was colonized by the Danes in 1721 and the entire population was Christianized by zealous Lutherans from Scandinavia. Intermarriage was common, a tool for assimilation, and though the population of Greenland is 85 percent Inuit, there is little pure blood left. What makes the far northern corner of the island unique is that colonization only went as far north as Tasiusaq, leaving the Polar Eskimos who lived along the Melville Peninsula all the way north to Siorapaluk largely unaffected by Europeanization for another two hundred years.
Beneath a chandelier we drank French Bordeaux and ate boiled seal and potatoes. This was the capital city, after all, with a prosperous-looking population of 14,000. Olejorgen's sister, Esther, doe-eyed and high-cheekboned, joined us with her Danish friend, Poul. A midwife, she had already delivered 285 babies that year and was about to set out by skiff to visit outlying villages where she would teach women how to deliver babies. Poul looked on, complacently smoking his pipe. He had left his own Danish family to join this one, and had lost all interest in returning home to Denmark; he had happily settled in with his job as editor of Greenland's bilingual (Danish-Greenlandic) newspaper, and with his Inuit "wife."
The next morning Ann asked where I was going, and I showed her on the map. "Awwkk . . . you can't go there," she said, making a face. "No, no. You must come north with us on the ferry to Uummannaq, the real Greenland, the one that Knud Rasmussen writes about." And I did.
We took the ferry-though it carried no cars, there being no roads between villages-and made a slow passage north. Women smoked and played cards, children ran, and Danish-style food was served in a cafeteria. I spent my time up on deck. Halfway up Viagut Strait, we passed an iceberg with a hole burrowed into its flank like a telescope through which I felt I could see the origins of green and blue, of ice itself.
Ice is what Greenlanders longed for and loved. We careened through pavilions and amphitheaters of ice, past mesas that had been halved and rejoined by summer's heat, exposing a central rift that was all azure rubble. As we proceeded north the ship's wake seemed to close over what was left of time.
A thousand years ago the hunter's world was made of ice and darkness, water and light, meat eaten raw and dried, and skins-dog, seal, polar bear, reindeer, Arctic hare, and eider duck-that were sewn into clothes, tents, and sleeping bags. The seasons rocked back and forth between light and dark and the ice was always moving: the top of Greenland is jostled by 52,000 square miles of Arctic sea, most of it ice. Polynyas-areas of open water-were created when surging tidal currents broke the ice, and stayed open like unhealing sores in midwinter. The land was an ocean that broke against bodies of water, shattering into islands big and small. Tides arm-wrestled pack ice until it accordioned up against itself, finally falling onto the mainland's shore. Glaciers calved great slabs of ice as big as convention centers and as fanciful as the Taj Mahal, and these sailed down the fjords all summer, their arches, towers, and shoulders collapsing in sudden heat as if from a fit of laughter.
Up on deck I met an old woman who had been napping. She asked if I spoke Danish. Nye, I said. American. A floe exploded on the starboard side and bits of ice avalanched down into foaming, churning water. "Now we are going north," the old woman said, standing at the rail, her chin greasy with seal fat because, earlier, she had shared a rack of seal ribs with her grandson. The ice rubble that hit the hull made a thunking sound and the ship veered. "This is not the same world as the one you come from. Even now you are being deceived," she told me. "In early times the people said the land was thin and all kinds of talk between things and animals was possible because all things and all beings were the same; everything was interchangeable." A pod of ringed seals burst out of the water, then dove, leaving in their place a piece of green ice shaped like a harpoon.
Just before dawn, I went out on deck and found Olejorgen standing in the bow. He looked nervous and excited and his cheeks were red.
I wondered if he had a fever. He complained of "a polar headache." "Rasmussen used to get them too," he said. A tower of rotten ice collapsed as we glided by. "When I get to Uummannaq I must find an elder who will explain things to me, who will be patient and teach me about using dogs, about the ice, about how to hunt the animals." Neither of us could have imagined then how much he would have to learn just to survive his years of instruction.
Olejorgen had left a wife, a son, and an unfinished law career behind to start a new life with another woman, a child on the way, and a burning desire to claim an Inuit hunting life that, because of geography, he had been denied...
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Vintage Books edition (January 7, 2003)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 377 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679758526
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679758525
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 1 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #210,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Artic Polar Region Travel Guides
- #83 in Arctic & Antarctica History
- #795 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
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Customers praise the book for its well-written and poetic writing style. They find the descriptions vivid and authentic, describing daily life and community customs. Many readers find the book interesting and insightful, providing a fascinating look at a land steeped in tradition and culture. The narrative is described as wonderful, exciting, and powerful.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers enjoy the book's writing style. They find it well-written and engaging. The adventures are told with wonderful words and poetic imagination. Readers praise the author's writing abilities and consider the book thoughtfully written.
"...I recommend this book to anyone who loves beautifully written adventures. They are here." Read more
"...Ehrlich is a wonderful writer who knows how to turn a phrase. But...but....but--why I am only giving this three stars?..." Read more
"...The book is well-written and kept me involved in her experiences all the way through. Now we know more of what we will see next year." Read more
"The tale of a person's odissey at the exloration of Greeland, told with wonderful words and poetic imagination...." Read more
Customers find the book interesting and insightful. They appreciate the author's exploration of a land steeped in tradition and culture. The book effectively mixes the author's story with historical information, drawing readers into the characters and their experiences. Readers say the book inspires them to travel to Greenland.
"...of her feelings and those of the indigenous people were vivid and drew you in. Gretel Ehrlich is not a tourist in her travels...." Read more
"...takes us on many wonderful journeys by dogsled and gives the reader a most fascinating viewpoint - right behind the dogs...." Read more
"...and the author definitely painted a vivid picture of daily life, community customs, traditions, folklore, language, and food...." Read more
"I very much enjoyed this book. It was a fascinating look at a land steeped in tradition and culture, and I feel I got to know the people and their..." Read more
Customers find the book authentic. They appreciate the author's poetic descriptions and vivid imagery of the ice and people. The images and expression of feelings are vivid, drawing you in. The author paints a vivid picture of daily life, community customs, and traditions. It's honest and raw in describing life on the island. The contrasts and emotional bonds between characters and experiences build an emotional bond.
"...Her imagery and expression of her feelings and those of the indigenous people were vivid and drew you in...." Read more
"...'s and explorer's interwoven in the story, as well as the raw authenticity of the author in terms of her experiences with the people, land and..." Read more
"...people in Greenland, and the author definitely painted a vivid picture of daily life, community customs, traditions, folklore, language, and food...." Read more
"...our chance to re-encounter characters and experiences, builds a powerful emotional bond...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and fascinating. They describe it as a powerful read about Inuit culture and homeland in Greenland.
"This amazing book opened my eyes to the Inuit culture and homeland in a most unexpected way...." Read more
"Really interesting book regarding the Greenlander Inuit and one woman's journey through the region...." Read more
"I very much enjoyed this book...." Read more
"Gretel Ehrlich's wonderful book has been a nightly treat, savored at the fireside...." Read more
Customers enjoy the narrative quality. They find the story wonderful, exciting, and interesting. Readers mention the book provides an inspiring account of travel to Greenland.
"...Inspirational. One exciting chapter after another. You're certainly learning a lot, but you are also on the ride!..." Read more
"An awesome read. Exactly what I had hoped this would be. A wonderful narrative of the lands I wish I could visit (or even live in), despite the..." Read more
"...about it the entire journey..Bravo Ms. Ehrlich thanks for the wonderful story!" Read more
"very interesting account of travel to Greenland..." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2021You felt you were right there in the author's exploits through Greenland. Her imagery and expression of her feelings and those of the indigenous people were vivid and drew you in. Gretel Ehrlich is not a tourist in her travels. She is brave, hardy, absorbing the culture, explaining it to us. Inspirational.
One exciting chapter after another.
You're certainly learning a lot, but you are also on the ride! Sometimes its on a dogsled packed 7 ft tall driving across the accordian style, frozen-in-place waves of the extended shoreline!
- Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2007This amazing book opened my eyes to the Inuit culture and homeland in a most unexpected way. I really bought it hoping to learn something about Inuit kayak hunters, but that aspect of Inuit hunting life is not heavily covered in the book. Instead, the author takes us on many wonderful journeys by dogsled and gives the reader a most fascinating viewpoint - right behind the dogs. We experience the hard but thrilling life of the skilled Arctic hunter as described by an articulate passenger in the sled, and in that way we come to know the people of the north country in a most sympathetic way.
I recommend this book to anyone who loves beautifully written adventures. They are here.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2009Really interesting book regarding the Greenlander Inuit and one woman's journey through the region. I particularly like the inclusion of previous author's and explorer's interwoven in the story, as well as the raw authenticity of the author in terms of her experiences with the people, land and culture.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2011I read this book over the past two months or so, and found almost all of it to be very interesting. I wanted to find out what life is like for ordinary people in Greenland, and the author definitely painted a vivid picture of daily life, community customs, traditions, folklore, language, and food. Life there is completely different from life in America, and I was amazed at how people were able to live in the harsh Arctic environment. The author also addresses how modern technology and global climate change are affecting the people's lives. My only complaint is that it did start to feel a bit repetitive towards the end.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2010I very much enjoyed this book. It was a fascinating look at a land steeped in tradition and culture, and I feel I got to know the people and their lives.
Ehrlich is a wonderful writer who knows how to turn a phrase. But...but....but--why I am only giving this three stars? It's because I felt the book was too much of a good thing. While the stories of the people she met and the Inuit ways are fascinating, do I really need to read 356 pages of how beautiful the ice was over and over and over and over? How many times do I have to hear that "ice is chaos", "ice is time", "the ice was like newly shampooed hair", "the sun was like a flashlight", "the ice was like broken dishes", etc. This gets tiresome very fast. Enough already! I get it-the ice is beautiful and it's cold. Too much of the same thing and too many metaphors detracts from the power of the whole. I wish Ehrlich would have put the metaphor-theasurus away for at least two consecutive pages.
I'm sure that to Ehrlich all of her endless trips across the ice are individual, but to me, they all sound the same. She could have cut out the descriptions of about 10 of the trips she made on the ice, which would have cut the book by 50-100 pages, and had a much more powerful account. Although I loved most of the book, I finally couldn't wait for it to end. She made something that was fascinating into an account that was, ultimately, boring and endless.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2012I read this book to learn about the land (and ice!) of Greenland before we go there next year. And I learned a lot, from a lady who's spent time with the native Greenlanders in their villages and on their excursions in summer and winter. The book is well-written and kept me involved in her experiences all the way through. Now we know more of what we will see next year.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2003Gretel Ehrlich's wonderful book has been a nightly treat, savored at the fireside. Since the lives of the Greenland Inuit are so remote from daily experience, it takes quite a bit of adjustment to enter into their perspective. Ehrlich accomplishes this through an obsessive, recurring immersion, reminiscent of her hero Knud Rassmussen. She went back to Greenland seven times, for goodness sakes! The focus she achieves through these revisitings, and our chance to re-encounter characters and experiences, builds a powerful emotional bond. I felt a real loss when I had to say goodbye to these characters for the final time. This is a deceptively beautiful, powerful book.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2002My fellow Wyo resident Gretel Ehrlich has never been a personal favorite of mine - I have found her writing a bit bloodless and strident. This Cold Heaven is no exception. Fortunately in this case, bloodless not only works, it is preferable. The native residents of Greenland are a hardcore bunch of seal-eating, dog whipping, communal living Last Best Men and their stories rival any on the planet for sheer toughness. Ehrlich packs her book with tales of ice explorers like Peter Freuschen and Knud Rasmussen, who make the cowboys, Marines and murderous I have known seem as simpering as Boy George and Anne Heche off their Wellbutrin. The author weaves their tales cleverly among her own personal accounts of more modest contemporary adventures, although we never really get to see what drives Ehrlich to this place. Maybe that doesn't matter. Ignore the Luddite whining that stains books like these and you're in for a treat.
Top reviews from other countries
- Anna KatharinaReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Exvellent
Very informative juxtaposing Rasmussen and the present
- Chris HReviewed in Germany on August 13, 2023
3.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written but lacking structure
It was well written and with great insight regarding the people, lives and traditions. Also capturing the last of the changing or even dissappearing way of live. It was not an easy read as it lacks structure, but a stream of anecdotes and diary flow that goes from one idea or event to another, with only chronological link. Great as a historical recording, not as an entertaining read.
- LizzieReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars amazing and eminently readable review of a very different world ...
amazing and eminently readable review of a very different world and a different way of living. Both highly informative and thought provoking, built around the journeys of an early Danish explorer and also making clear the future challenges for the Inuit of the overspills of the rest of this world (global warming, alcohol, etc).
- TintenfischReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 17, 2003
4.0 out of 5 stars Not a travel book, a book about obsession
Most people understand implicitly why someone may love Italy,or France, or India, say.But someone who goes to Greenland, not just once but again and again and again, not because they have to but because they want to , is a much rarer commodity. Gretel Ehrlich is such a person.And in her criss-crossings of Greenland, in all weathers-usually cold!-she meets other such people.Danes who are disenchanted with the rat-race and want a cleaner, purer environment for themselves and their children. A Japanese who came thirty or so years ago and just didn't want to leave. What is so compelling ? The strangeness and near-pristine nature of the landscape itself. The nature of the Inuit lifestyle, basic at times, but bound up with nature , very rich in stories, very authentic. And to be in a place where, even now, watches and clocks don't matter very much and where television is an occasional and rather surreal experience. Ehrlich weaves a spell with her writing-alternately lyrical and prosaic. Maybe in the end she doesn't even know herself quite why she keeps going back. . .she just does.Greenland speaks to some inner need.
I'd give this 5 stars were it not for the over-lengthy text, which could have done with some editing without ruining the flavour.
A particularly attractive feature is the way Ehrlich intersperses her own experiences of Greenland with those of Knud Rasmussen, who travelled to Greenland in the Twenties and whose ethnological research into the Inuit lifestyle has stood the test of time.
- F. GleisnerReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 24, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars He really liked it.
A present for my father in law. He really liked it.