This Cold Heaven

From Barnes & Noble

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)

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—hunting 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—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Random House, Vintage, 377p. map. bibliog. index., Boardman

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 Cahners Business Information.