This Cold Heaven

For the last decade, Gretel Ehrlich has been obsessed by an island, a terrain, a culture, and the treacherous beauty of a world that is defined by ice. InThis Cold Heavenshe combines the story of her travels with history and cultural anthropology to reveal a Greenland that few of us could otherwise imagine. 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 Heavenis at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world.

Gretel Ehrlich is the author of <b>A Match to the Heart</b>, among other works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She divides her time between California and Wyoming.