Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape - Softcover

Lopez, Barry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375727485 ISBN 13: 9780375727481

Publisher: Vintage Books USA, 2001

Synopsis

Winner of the National Book Award

This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing.

The Arctic is a perilous place. Only a few species of wild animals can survive its harsh climate. In this modern classic, Barry Lopez explores the many-faceted wonders of the Far North: its strangely stunted forest, its mesmerizing aurora borealis, its frozen seas. Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other exotic beasts of the region come alive through Lopez's passionate and nuanced observations. And, as he examines the history and culture of the indigenous people, along with parallel narratives of intrepid, often underprepared and subsequently doomed polar explorers, Lopez drives to the heart of why the austere and formidable Arctic is also a constant source of breathtaking beauty, beguilement, and wonder.

Written in prose as memorably pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations.

Look for Barry Lopez's new book, Horizon, available now.

About this title

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".

--Toby Green

Review:

"Extraordinary. . . . A master nature writer." --The New York Times Book Review

"One of those landmark works of travel writing." --The New Yorker

"Dazzling. . . . Treats the distant, snowy world of the Arctic as a place that exists not only in the mathematics of geography but also in the terra incognita of our imaginations." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Lopez is. . .the most important living writer about wilderness. . . . [Arctic Dreams is] his masterpiece." --The Guardian

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0375727485
• ISBN 13: 9780375727481
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496