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Books : This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland
Rating: 
- This Cold Heaven
This book was a treasure that fell, I don't remember whether one morning or night, from Book TV. Being of Norwegian ancestry, and having ancient voyagers in my direct line, I became fascinated with the author's story. Hoping to find some tales of native legends and myths of the kind that Sigrid Undset's historical novels had first drawn to my attention, I bought the book.
I was not disappointed. Ehrlich weaves her words by alternating the fabric of her seven seasons with allied chapters of other Northern wanderers and explorers. This organization, I feel, makes the book somewhat hard to read in two or three sittings. Yet every page is worth the effort.
Having flown over both Greenland and Iceland, I can verify that Greenland is white and Iceland is green. But snow and ice is not just white, and a sled is not just a sled. Erhlich's language is richly nuanced and lyrical. She has the gift of writing prose like a poet. Having lived her stories, she knows her subject, and you easily feel yourself in her shoes as she relates her experiences.
Little gems keep falling from her pages, like the story about the artist, Rockwell Kent, who had lived in Greenland. This immediately explains the stark beauty of his block prints. Treat yourself to this book and read it on some dark and stormy night -- or to cool off on a hot summer afternoon. Either way, you will be refreshed by the experience.
Rating: - A paean to the Inuit and to Greenland
"This Cold Heaven" is more than anything an ode, a paean to Greenland by one woman. I think in some ways she loves that icebound land as much as Lawrence of Arabia was reported to love the desert, and perhaps for somewhat similar reasons. Her book was full of poetic descriptions of towering icebergs, driving snowstorms, crisp nearly eternal nights, and sheets of mirror-like ice. Admiring the vast ice sheet covering the island, which she described as "a siren singing me back to Greenland, its walls of sapphire blue and sheer immensity always beguiling," she really put me there on that island. An American writer, she was drawn to Greenland again and again over the better part of a decade and in this book she chronicles her experiences there as well as much information on Greenland, chiefly about the Inuit people of that land, though to a lesser extent about some of its fauna, flora, geology, and climate. She recounts her travels - mainly by dogsled, but also by boat and helicopter - throughout this largest island in the world, a land under which 95% of it is still locked in ice, a land in which some say the Ice Age never ended at all.
The stars of the book are the Inuit, both as a people and as individuals. Clearly a people she greatly admires both as a culture and as individuals, the reader will learn much about them, descendents of Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia perhaps 30,000 years, settling Greenland some 5,000 years ago. Their culture - stretching some 6,000 miles from Greenland through Alaska - is a surprisingly unified one, largely speaking the same language and telling the same stories. Indeed not only have they been very unified across distances on land but also across distances in time; many Inuit in Greenland are still essentially using stone and bone age technology (though one increasingly threatened by the arrival of modern technology and the Danish welfare state), even creating string figure art of woolly mammoths, a unique societal memory of a species extinct for many thousands of years.
The Inuit we find are often a people of vivid contrasts and to us perhaps strange habits. Though they enjoy the summer time, which in their part of the world is short though one of unending daylight, they most enjoy the completely dark winters, something perhaps counterintuitive to those not native there; it is only in the dark time of the year that fjords and bays are ice, allowing long sled trips for hunting and for visiting friends. Clocks and calendars are nearly meaningless to the Inuit; Ehrlich often found it to be the case either in the unending night of winter (we also learn by the way that the Inuit word for "winter" also means "a year") or in the unending day of summer people would be awake at any hour, whether to fix dinner, socialize, or begin a hunt. One on occasion when a visitor remarked that a dogsled expedition should be gotten off to an early start, Ehrlich recounted how one of the Inuit laughed, stating that their day had more hours.
Inuit food may appear equally strange to the typical American or European; they eat a virtually all- meat diet, the climate and terrain of Greenland completely unsuited to agriculture. Seal, walrus, polar bear, whale, dovekie, auk, and fish are the mainstays of Inuit diet, many times boiled or dried, sometimes eaten raw. One of the more interesting foods they eat is kivioq, a delicacy made from dead auks sewn into a seal gut and left to rot for two months. Though upsetting many Western environmentalists, Ehrlich does an excellent job of showing how the Inuit hunt for survival, not for profit or ritual. Many times she went on dogsled expeditions during which if a hunt for seal was unsuccessful dogs and later people would starve. Clearly the Inuit of Greenland hunt for food and for furs to make warm clothing, doing so with the greatest respect for the animals. Any money they made from their hunts went to buy necessities, such as fuel oil or pencils for children in school.
Ehrlich makes much of the strange dichotomy of seeming cruelty and community. On the one hand during times of hardship, after their much beloved (and utterly important) dogs were eaten (as well as their sleds; we find that in the past that sleds were sometimes constructed of edible materials, with skins soaked in water and frozen into place for runners and even solid frozen chunks of salmon or seal flesh for other parts) the Inuit would turn to cannibalism, even eating their own children. The very old were often expected to die if they became a burden to their community, and orphans, particularly if outsiders, could often be quite harshly treated. Inuit parents she noted often laughed at their children's misfortunes as they learned to handle a sled or hunt, all in an effort to teach them survival skills, however cruel that might appear to an outsider. On the other hand though, the Inuit could be thought of the ideal Communists to some degree; no one owned land. When meat was available, it was freely shared to all who needed. Dogs were always fed first (though this was not entirely altruistic, as aside from kayaks in water this was their chief means of locomotion) and even widows in villages would share in the bounty of a great hunt. Ehrlich spends a good deal of the book recounting the adventures and travels of the ethnographer Knud Rasmussen (a Danish researcher who launched seven expeditions between 1910 and 1933 to study the Inuit people all over Greenland and west to Siberia) and his friend Peter Freuchen, clear outsiders who were warmly welcomed into village after village, whose lived were saved by Inuit, people who brought them into their homes, shared their food, their stories, their way of life.
A wonderful book.
Rating:
- An Interesting Read
Having never heard of Gretel Ehrlich I came to this book without any idea of the author's past experiences. The book is incredibly intense. The first half of the book is more difficult to read that the second half. The author alludes to personal trauma and a need to confront her own fears but does so in a disjointed style. Her musing about the effects of total darkness and the climate made me wonder exactly what she was trying to say. Better editing in this section might help. What made me persist was my need to find out more about Greenland and its Inuit people as well as to try and understand what made Ehrlich keep going back. At times I wondered if she was hoping to die out on the ice. There is a deep sadness that seems to run through her during this time that is reflected in the effect of modernisation and outsider intervention into the lives of the indigenous people. Throughout the book she is always living on the edge of the society unable to find a way in. The lonely curious outsider. Her usage of Rasmussen as a guide to many different facets of the history and exploration of Greenland, and the American Artic improves over time. His travels and travails seem to have been a large part of her inspiration during the trips to Greenland.
An unusual book that is worth the effort it takes to read it.
Rating: - Brilliant book
I absolutely loved this book. It was amazingly dreamlike and informative at the same time. The inspiration to visit Greenland is so much stronger after reading this book. My own library of Greenland books is huge, but largely historical and/or archaeological. This book brings me "real" Greenland. Reading it every night until completed literally inspired many evenings of Greenlandic dreams.
Rating: - Ehrlich's amazing travelogue of northern Greenland
Ten years ago, I thought taking a ferry up the west coast of Greenland would be a great vacation. I'll never get there, but Gretel Ehrlich's book about her several trips to the northwest Greenland towns of Uummannaq, Illorsuit, and Qaanaaq has more than satisfied my curiosity. The book is an astounding look at as remote a spot as still exists on earth today -- an area so isolated by ice and weather that the way of life seems primitive beyond belief -- and the people who live there. Qaanaaq is so far north that the sun never rises from late October until February, and never sets for four months in the spring and summer. Most of the people in these towns are subsistence hunters, relying on the seals, walrus, narwhals, polar bears, caribou, hares, foxes, and birds they can catch to feed and clothe them (there are basically no edible plants there except berries). Until recently their houses were built of stone and peat, and even today most belongings and equipment are made of stone or animal body parts. Ehrlich presents the brutal difficulty of the hardscrabble life in detail, yet still conveys the Greenlandic love of this way of life so well that you are saddened to learn that the encroaching reach of consumer society and global climate change may bring it to an end.
Ehrlich's descriptions of her travels and the people she meets (for example, the dogsled maker "who knew all about trees but had never seen one growing") are fascinating and incisive. There are also several interesting chapters recounting the explorations of Knud Rasmussen, a Greenlandic national hero who traveled northern Greenland and the Canadian Arctic documenting the Inuit culture. Ehrlich's obsession with Rockwell Kent, an artist who spent time in Illorsuit, is less interesting. The weakest part of the book is Ehrlich's tendency to jump from crystalline narration into amorphous, abstract reveries ("Darkness reconciles all time and disparity. It is a kind of rapture in which life is no longer lived brokenly."); thankfully, these moments become fewer as the book goes on. People who are morally opposed to hunting are hereby warned that several long chapters cover Ehrlich accompanying locals on hunting trips by dogsled.
(1=poor 2=mediocre 3=pretty good 4=very good 5=phenomenal)
- This Cold HeavenThis book was a treasure that fell, I don't remember whether one morning or night, from Book TV. Being of Norwegian ancestry, and having ancient voyagers in my direct line, I became fascinated with the author's story. Hoping to find some tales of native legends and myths of the kind that Sigrid Undset's historical novels had first drawn to my attention, I bought the book.
I was not disappointed. Ehrlich weaves her words by alternating the fabric of her seven seasons with allied chapters of other Northern wanderers and explorers. This organization, I feel, makes the book somewhat hard to read in two or three sittings. Yet every page is worth the effort.
Having flown over both Greenland and Iceland, I can verify that Greenland is white and Iceland is green. But snow and ice is not just white, and a sled is not just a sled. Erhlich's language is richly nuanced and lyrical. She has the gift of writing prose like a poet. Having lived her stories, she knows her subject, and you easily feel yourself in her shoes as she relates her experiences.
Little gems keep falling from her pages, like the story about the artist, Rockwell Kent, who had lived in Greenland. This immediately explains the stark beauty of his block prints. Treat yourself to this book and read it on some dark and stormy night -- or to cool off on a hot summer afternoon. Either way, you will be refreshed by the experience.
Rating:
- A paean to the Inuit and to Greenland"This Cold Heaven" is more than anything an ode, a paean to Greenland by one woman. I think in some ways she loves that icebound land as much as Lawrence of Arabia was reported to love the desert, and perhaps for somewhat similar reasons. Her book was full of poetic descriptions of towering icebergs, driving snowstorms, crisp nearly eternal nights, and sheets of mirror-like ice. Admiring the vast ice sheet covering the island, which she described as "a siren singing me back to Greenland, its walls of sapphire blue and sheer immensity always beguiling," she really put me there on that island. An American writer, she was drawn to Greenland again and again over the better part of a decade and in this book she chronicles her experiences there as well as much information on Greenland, chiefly about the Inuit people of that land, though to a lesser extent about some of its fauna, flora, geology, and climate. She recounts her travels - mainly by dogsled, but also by boat and helicopter - throughout this largest island in the world, a land under which 95% of it is still locked in ice, a land in which some say the Ice Age never ended at all.
The stars of the book are the Inuit, both as a people and as individuals. Clearly a people she greatly admires both as a culture and as individuals, the reader will learn much about them, descendents of Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia perhaps 30,000 years, settling Greenland some 5,000 years ago. Their culture - stretching some 6,000 miles from Greenland through Alaska - is a surprisingly unified one, largely speaking the same language and telling the same stories. Indeed not only have they been very unified across distances on land but also across distances in time; many Inuit in Greenland are still essentially using stone and bone age technology (though one increasingly threatened by the arrival of modern technology and the Danish welfare state), even creating string figure art of woolly mammoths, a unique societal memory of a species extinct for many thousands of years.
The Inuit we find are often a people of vivid contrasts and to us perhaps strange habits. Though they enjoy the summer time, which in their part of the world is short though one of unending daylight, they most enjoy the completely dark winters, something perhaps counterintuitive to those not native there; it is only in the dark time of the year that fjords and bays are ice, allowing long sled trips for hunting and for visiting friends. Clocks and calendars are nearly meaningless to the Inuit; Ehrlich often found it to be the case either in the unending night of winter (we also learn by the way that the Inuit word for "winter" also means "a year") or in the unending day of summer people would be awake at any hour, whether to fix dinner, socialize, or begin a hunt. One on occasion when a visitor remarked that a dogsled expedition should be gotten off to an early start, Ehrlich recounted how one of the Inuit laughed, stating that their day had more hours.
Inuit food may appear equally strange to the typical American or European; they eat a virtually all- meat diet, the climate and terrain of Greenland completely unsuited to agriculture. Seal, walrus, polar bear, whale, dovekie, auk, and fish are the mainstays of Inuit diet, many times boiled or dried, sometimes eaten raw. One of the more interesting foods they eat is kivioq, a delicacy made from dead auks sewn into a seal gut and left to rot for two months. Though upsetting many Western environmentalists, Ehrlich does an excellent job of showing how the Inuit hunt for survival, not for profit or ritual. Many times she went on dogsled expeditions during which if a hunt for seal was unsuccessful dogs and later people would starve. Clearly the Inuit of Greenland hunt for food and for furs to make warm clothing, doing so with the greatest respect for the animals. Any money they made from their hunts went to buy necessities, such as fuel oil or pencils for children in school.
Ehrlich makes much of the strange dichotomy of seeming cruelty and community. On the one hand during times of hardship, after their much beloved (and utterly important) dogs were eaten (as well as their sleds; we find that in the past that sleds were sometimes constructed of edible materials, with skins soaked in water and frozen into place for runners and even solid frozen chunks of salmon or seal flesh for other parts) the Inuit would turn to cannibalism, even eating their own children. The very old were often expected to die if they became a burden to their community, and orphans, particularly if outsiders, could often be quite harshly treated. Inuit parents she noted often laughed at their children's misfortunes as they learned to handle a sled or hunt, all in an effort to teach them survival skills, however cruel that might appear to an outsider. On the other hand though, the Inuit could be thought of the ideal Communists to some degree; no one owned land. When meat was available, it was freely shared to all who needed. Dogs were always fed first (though this was not entirely altruistic, as aside from kayaks in water this was their chief means of locomotion) and even widows in villages would share in the bounty of a great hunt. Ehrlich spends a good deal of the book recounting the adventures and travels of the ethnographer Knud Rasmussen (a Danish researcher who launched seven expeditions between 1910 and 1933 to study the Inuit people all over Greenland and west to Siberia) and his friend Peter Freuchen, clear outsiders who were warmly welcomed into village after village, whose lived were saved by Inuit, people who brought them into their homes, shared their food, their stories, their way of life.
A wonderful book.
Rating:
- An Interesting ReadHaving never heard of Gretel Ehrlich I came to this book without any idea of the author's past experiences. The book is incredibly intense. The first half of the book is more difficult to read that the second half. The author alludes to personal trauma and a need to confront her own fears but does so in a disjointed style. Her musing about the effects of total darkness and the climate made me wonder exactly what she was trying to say. Better editing in this section might help. What made me persist was my need to find out more about Greenland and its Inuit people as well as to try and understand what made Ehrlich keep going back. At times I wondered if she was hoping to die out on the ice. There is a deep sadness that seems to run through her during this time that is reflected in the effect of modernisation and outsider intervention into the lives of the indigenous people. Throughout the book she is always living on the edge of the society unable to find a way in. The lonely curious outsider. Her usage of Rasmussen as a guide to many different facets of the history and exploration of Greenland, and the American Artic improves over time. His travels and travails seem to have been a large part of her inspiration during the trips to Greenland.
An unusual book that is worth the effort it takes to read it.
Rating:
- Brilliant bookI absolutely loved this book. It was amazingly dreamlike and informative at the same time. The inspiration to visit Greenland is so much stronger after reading this book. My own library of Greenland books is huge, but largely historical and/or archaeological. This book brings me "real" Greenland. Reading it every night until completed literally inspired many evenings of Greenlandic dreams.
Rating:
- Ehrlich's amazing travelogue of northern GreenlandTen years ago, I thought taking a ferry up the west coast of Greenland would be a great vacation. I'll never get there, but Gretel Ehrlich's book about her several trips to the northwest Greenland towns of Uummannaq, Illorsuit, and Qaanaaq has more than satisfied my curiosity. The book is an astounding look at as remote a spot as still exists on earth today -- an area so isolated by ice and weather that the way of life seems primitive beyond belief -- and the people who live there. Qaanaaq is so far north that the sun never rises from late October until February, and never sets for four months in the spring and summer. Most of the people in these towns are subsistence hunters, relying on the seals, walrus, narwhals, polar bears, caribou, hares, foxes, and birds they can catch to feed and clothe them (there are basically no edible plants there except berries). Until recently their houses were built of stone and peat, and even today most belongings and equipment are made of stone or animal body parts. Ehrlich presents the brutal difficulty of the hardscrabble life in detail, yet still conveys the Greenlandic love of this way of life so well that you are saddened to learn that the encroaching reach of consumer society and global climate change may bring it to an end.
Ehrlich's descriptions of her travels and the people she meets (for example, the dogsled maker "who knew all about trees but had never seen one growing") are fascinating and incisive. There are also several interesting chapters recounting the explorations of Knud Rasmussen, a Greenlandic national hero who traveled northern Greenland and the Canadian Arctic documenting the Inuit culture. Ehrlich's obsession with Rockwell Kent, an artist who spent time in Illorsuit, is less interesting. The weakest part of the book is Ehrlich's tendency to jump from crystalline narration into amorphous, abstract reveries ("Darkness reconciles all time and disparity. It is a kind of rapture in which life is no longer lived brokenly."); thankfully, these moments become fewer as the book goes on. People who are morally opposed to hunting are hereby warned that several long chapters cover Ehrlich accompanying locals on hunting trips by dogsled.
(1=poor 2=mediocre 3=pretty good 4=very good 5=phenomenal)