's Best of 2001
From the acclaimed chronicler of open spaces, Gretel Ehrlich, comes a stunning and lyrical evocation of a practically unknown place and people. Beginning in 1993, Ehrlich traveled to Greenland, the northernmost country in the world, in every season--the four months of perpetual dark (in which the average temperature is 25 degrees below zero), the four months of constant daylight, and the twilight seasons in between--traveling up the west coast, often by dogsled, and befriending the resilient and generous Inuits along the way. Greenland, unlike its name, is 95 percent ice--a landscape of deep rock-walled fjords, glaciers, narwhal whales swimming among icebergs the size of football fields, walruses busting through oceans of shifting ice. In the far north, the polar Inuit--the "real heroes"--still dress in bear and seal skins, and hunt walrus, polar bears, and whales with harpoons. The only constant is weather and the perilous movements of ice, the only transport is dogsled, and the closest village may be a month and a half-long dogsled journey away. The people share an austere and harsh life, lightened with humor and the fantastic stories of Sila, the god of weather, Nerrivik, the goddess of waters, of humans transforming themselves into animals, and interspecies marriages. Interwoven with Ehrlich's journey is the even more remarkable story of Knud Rasmussen, the founder of Eskimology, an Inuit-Danish explorer and ethnographer who took some of the most hazardous and brilliant expeditions ever, including a three and a half-year, 20,000-mile adventure by dogsled across the polar north to Alaska. Like Rasmussen, Ehrlich learns that the landscape of Greenland is "less a description of desolation than an ode to the beauty of impermanence." Alternately mind-expanding, gripping, and dreamlike, This Cold Heaven is a revelation. --Lesley Reed


From Publishers Weekly
The book's epigraph, "I am nothing. I see all," comes from Emerson, but it might have been spoken by any of the shamans, mythical animals or spirit guides who inhabit this haunting work. It also catches the tenor of Ehrlich's concerns, for as an essayist and a naturalist, she frequently explores the relationship between the physical world and the province of the unseen. In the summer of 1993, recovering from a lightning strike that left her with a dodgy heart, Ehrlich (A Match to the Heart) set out on the first of many journeys to Greenland. Over the next seven years, she made her way across the high Arctic, traveling by dogsled, skiff and fixed-wing airplane, "in a country of no roads, where solitude is thought to be a form of failure." Inspired by the expedition notes of Knud Rasmussen, the brilliant Inuit-Danish explorer and ethnographer who recorded what Ehrlich calls the "lifeways" of the Inuit people, she traveled with subsistence hunters, spending weeks at a time on ice. Stylistically, Ehrlich achieves an arctic clarity, pared down and translucent. Because she is not content to merely narrate events, her divagations, as well as Rasmussen's, serve as jumping-off points for all manner of inquiry just as the Eskimos, to borrow her metaphor, used "ice as a flint on which their imaginations were fired." Reading Ehrlich, one gets the impression that she has no fixed idea about the progress of her journeys across the snow or the page. This very vulnerability, along with the narrative's pervasive sadness and loss, infuses the book with a quiet power. Maps and illus. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Ehrlich, whose work is shot through with an awe for nature, spent seven years visiting Greenland to try to understand how the Inuits survive their inhospitable home. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Nature writer Ehrlich has lived an intrepid and questing life, writing about her experiences in thoughtful and poetic odes to wild places, as well as in an unforgettable account of being struck and seriously injured by lightning. She began her extensive sojourns in Greenland in the aftermath of that profound event, and fell in love with the world of ice and its seasons of ceaseless light and unbroken dark. Ehrlich became equally enamored of the polar Inuit, "cold-adapted" but warmhearted people struggling to live as their ancestors did for thousands of years. Jubilant riding on dogsleds with Inuit hunters in the treacherous but bracing realm of glaciers, icebergs, and storms, and happy in the embrace of communal Greenlandic households, Ehrlich steeped herself in the writings of the heroic Danish-Inuit ethnographer Knud Rasmussen, the "father of Eskimology," and the work of another American who found paradise in Greenland, the artist Rockwell Kent. By linking accounts of their lives with lyric descriptions of her own serendipitous and dramatic adventures, Ehrlich both celebrates the remarkable intimacy the Inuit have with the land and its animals and spirit, and chronicles the clangorous and toxic encroachment of consumer society on this pristine and precious realm. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Enigmatic and exuberant, Gretel Erhlich captures, if any seer and poet can, the hunt for beauty, the rapture of a foreboding landscape where man, polar bear, shaman, seal, dog, walrus, and narwhale entwine inseparably in a fragile, yet enduring embrace of timelessness on a planet spinning between ice-filled water and infinite space. Without a doubt, one of the finest books ever written about the polar regions."
--Wade Davis, Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society

"This strange and lovely book-- by turns travelogue, history, biography, memoir, and lyrical celebration-- beautifully captures the feel of the high Arctic and the lives of those who have lived and explored there. Reaching across the decades, Ehrlich has found in Rasmussen a kindred soul."
-Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

"Combining timidity, foolhardiness, tenacity, erudition and poetry, Gretel Ehrlich's is a superb voice for the miracle of Greenland. No one who reads this wonderful book will ever forget these singular people or the austerities of the land they inhabit."
-Thomas McGuane, author of The Longest Silence

"I'd always thought of Greenland as a hunk of mostly inhabited ice somewhere vaguely north. Not anymore. Gretel Ehrlich brings the people, the place, the ice itself alive in ways as vivid and startling as if she'd gone to another planet. In that cold landscape she finds real heat, the slush and juice of life fully lived amid terrifying extremes. She follows her nose for adventure to an edge most of us can barely imagine; read This Cold Heaven and go with her."
-Joe Kane, author of Crossing the Amazon


Review
"Enigmatic and exuberant, Gretel Erhlich captures, if any seer and poet can, the hunt for beauty, the rapture of a foreboding landscape where man, polar bear, shaman, seal, dog, walrus, and narwhale entwine inseparably in a fragile, yet enduring embrace of timelessness on a planet spinning between ice-filled water and infinite space. Without a doubt, one of the finest books ever written about the polar regions."
--Wade Davis, Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society

"This strange and lovely book-- by turns travelogue, history, biography, memoir, and lyrical celebration-- beautifully captures the feel of the high Arctic and the lives of those who have lived and explored there. Reaching across the decades, Ehrlich has found in Rasmussen a kindred soul."
-Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

"Combining timidity, foolhardiness, tenacity, erudition and poetry, Gretel Ehrlich's is a superb voice for the miracle of Greenland. No one who reads this wonderful book will ever forget these singular people or the austerities of the land they inhabit."
-Thomas McGuane, author of The Longest Silence

"I'd always thought of Greenland as a hunk of mostly inhabited ice somewhere vaguely north. Not anymore. Gretel Ehrlich brings the people, the place, the ice itself alive in ways as vivid and startling as if she'd gone to another planet. In that cold landscape she finds real heat, the slush and juice of life fully lived amid terrifying extremes. She follows her nose for adventure to an edge most of us can barely imagine; read This Cold Heaven and go with her."
-Joe Kane, author of Crossing the Amazon


Book 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.

Only the rocky fringe of its coast is habitable. There, the Inuit, the Arctic’s first explorers, have survived and thrived in the harshest of climates. For the Inuit, an ice-age, ice-adapted people who first traveled from Siberia across the polar North six thousand years ago, weather is consciousness. In a world composed of ice and darkness, water and light, where skins of dog, seal, bear, even hare and eider duck, are sewn into clothes, tents, and sleeping bags as protection, where transport is by dogsled and kayak, the only rein for the uncontrollable force of weather is an unbending self-discipline. The blend of physical endurance and psychological perseverance required for daily existence first drew Ehrlich to this terrain.

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.


From the Inside Flap

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.

Only the rocky fringe of its coast is habitable. There, the Inuit, the Arctic’s first explorers, have survived and thrived in the harshest of climates. For the Inuit, an ice-age, ice-adapted people who first traveled from Siberia across the polar North six thousand years ago, weather is consciousness. In a world composed of ice and darkness, water and light, where skins of dog, seal, bear, even hare and eider duck, are sewn into clothes, tents, and sleeping bags as protection, where transport is by dogsled and kayak, the only rein for the uncontrollable force of weather is an unbending self-discipline. The blend of physical endurance and psychological perseverance required for daily existence first drew Ehrlich to this terrain.

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.


From the Back Cover
"Enigmatic and exuberant, Gretel Erhlich captures, if any seer and poet can, the hunt for beauty, the rapture of a foreboding landscape where man, polar bear, shaman, seal, dog, walrus, and narwhale entwine inseparably in a fragile, yet enduring embrace of timelessness on a planet spinning between ice-filled water and infinite space. Without a doubt, one of the finest books ever written about the polar regions."
--Wade Davis, Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society

"This strange and lovely book-- by turns travelogue, history, biography, memoir, and lyrical celebration-- beautifully captures the feel of the high Arctic and the lives of those who have lived and explored there. Reaching across the decades, Ehrlich has found in Rasmussen a kindred soul."
-Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

"Combining timidity, foolhardiness, tenacity, erudition and poetry, Gretel Ehrlich's is a superb voice for the miracle of Greenland. No one who reads this wonderful book will ever forget these singular people or the austerities of the land they inhabit."
-Thomas McGuane, author of The Longest Silence

"I'd always thought of Greenland as a hunk of mostly inhabited ice somewhere vaguely north. Not anymore. Gretel Ehrlich brings the people, the place, the ice itself alive in ways as vivid and startling as if she'd gone to another planet. In that cold landscape she finds real heat, the slush and juice of life fully lived amid terrifying extremes. She follows her nose for adventure to an edge most of us can barely imagine; read This Cold Heaven and go with her."
-Joe Kane, author of Crossing the Amazon


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


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

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...

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Gretel Ehrlich has guts -- as well as a heart filled with feeling for the land and people of Greenland, and This Cold Heaven is the proof. Over the course of repeated journeys to and through this virtually unknown and frozen (in more ways than one) world, Ehrlich flays out in rich, moody prose the chronic travails of lives lived, for the past 5,000 years, literally on the edge of existence.

Ehrlich has entered a world where frostbite may have to be remedied by having your fellow traveler bite off your toes; where you may have to boil the sealskin harnesses from your dogsled to fight off starvation; where, deceived by the innocence of snow, a misplaced step may send you plunging into frigid open water. These things are simply unimaginable to most of us, but with the help of Ehrlich's visceral chronicling we can begin to grasp the paradigms of polar Eskimo life, both past and present. Throughout, Ehrlich also draws largely upon the work of the early-20th-century explorer Knud Rasmussen -- himself of Danish and Inuit birth -- interspersing the history of his multiple expeditions in the polar north with her own contemporary insights and adventures.

From the knife-edge of disappointment and gnawing hunger that a failed seal kill brings to both her and the Inuit hunters with whom she travels, to the heartbreak of goodbye to a longtime host's young daughter when she knows she is leaving the girl to a family constellation of alcoholism, poverty, and depression -- we find ourselves helpless against Ehrlich's white-hot candor, and we willingly share in her empathic bond with the Greenlanders. All this and more make This Cold Heaven not only an important work of modern experiential ethnography but also an altogether riveting read. (Janet Dudley)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

Only the rocky fringe of its coast is habitable. There, the Inuit, the Arctic's first explorers, have survived and thrived in the harshest of climates. For the Inuit, an ice-age, ice-adapted people who first traveled from Siberia across the polar North six thousand years ago, weather is consciousness. In a world composed of ice and darkness, water and light, where skins of dog, seal, bear, even hare and eider duck, are sewn into clothes, tents, and sleeping bags as protection, where transport is by dogsled and kayak, the only rein for the uncontrollable force of weather is an unbending self-discipline. The blend of physical endurance and psychological perseverance required for daily existence first drew Ehrlich to this terrain.

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The book's epigraph, "I am nothing. I see all," comes from Emerson, but it might have been spoken by any of the shamans, mythical animals or spirit guides who inhabit this haunting work. It also catches the tenor of Ehrlich's concerns, for as an essayist and a naturalist, she frequently explores the relationship between the physical world and the province of the unseen. In the summer of 1993, recovering from a lightning strike that left her with a dodgy heart, Ehrlich (A Match to the Heart) set out on the first of many journeys to Greenland. Over the next seven years, she made her way across the high Arctic, traveling by dogsled, skiff and fixed-wing airplane, "in a country of no roads, where solitude is thought to be a form of failure." Inspired by the expedition notes of Knud Rasmussen, the brilliant Inuit-Danish explorer and ethnographer who recorded what Ehrlich calls the "lifeways" of the Inuit people, she traveled with subsistence hunters, spending weeks at a time on ice. Stylistically, Ehrlich achieves an arctic clarity, pared down and translucent. Because she is not content to merely narrate events, her divagations, as well as Rasmussen's, serve as jumping-off points for all manner of inquiry just as the Eskimos, to borrow her metaphor, used "ice as a flint on which their imaginations were fired." Reading Ehrlich, one gets the impression that she has no fixed idea about the progress of her journeys across the snow or the page. This very vulnerability, along with the narrative's pervasive sadness and loss, infuses the book with a quiet power. Maps and illus. (Nov. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

Seven years of off-and-on residence in Greenland (1993-1999), in the constant light of summer, the three months of dark winter, and the twilight days in between, form the chain that links together the events in this book, which is part memoir, part historical narrative. Ehrlich made many friends during her travels, friends who fed and housed her, expedited her travels, and told her their stories. Their lives revolved around survival￯﾿ﾽhunting and fishing, preparing raw hides for garments, caring for dogs, coping with weather extremes, and adapting modern technology to make the old ways work better (e.g., fitting a motor to a handmade skiff). She observed their warmth, their commitment to life on the ice, and a personal lifestyle based on a principle of "consensual tolerance." She treats the reader to vignettes, some of old-fashioned natives who want to live as they always have; many who have rejected western, "civilized" lives to live in the cold north. They include: the woman doctor who does everything, including drive her dogsled alone to nearby villages; the man with the European education who chucks it all to reclaim his Eskimo heritage; the Japanese man who, suffocated by the tension and busyness back home, prefers a life of hunting and fishing; the American who couldn't adjust after Vietnam and chose to work ever after as a meteorologist at the American base at Thule; and teachers from Norway whose children learn Greenlandic faster than their parents do. Ehrlich tells what she sees, giving her observations context with her firm sense of geography, geology, history, linguistics, ethnography, and sociology. She interweaves information from the writings of explorers with her ownexperiences, especially from Peter Freuchen, a well-known scientist-explorer, and Knud Rasmussen, who in 1910-1933 lived in Greenland, traveled as far west as Point Hope, Alaska and Siberia, and kept some 6,000 pages worth of notes about the Arctic flora and fauna, the culture of the people, the landscape, and the weather and climate. This expertly written book will tickle the fancy of the many readers fascinated by the polar regions. KLIATT Codes: SA￯﾿ﾽRecommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Random House, Vintage, 377p. map. bibliog. index., Boardman

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