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

Lopez, Barry Holstun

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684185784 ISBN 13: 9780684185781

Publisher: Charles Scribners & Sons, 1986

Synopsis

A portrait of the landscape, animals, and people of the Arctic captures the beauty and peril of this harsh region and explains what an understanding of this unknown land means to the modern, urbanized world

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:

"Jubilant... Barry Lopez lavishes his discoveries into a portfolio of delights."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Wonderfully informed and evocative... Keen observation given shape with language that is deft and vivid."
--Chicago Tribune

"Rich, abundant, vigorously composed."
--The Boston Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Charles Scribners & Sons
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0684185784
• ISBN 13: 9780684185781
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464