This Cold Heaven - by Gretel Ehrlich (Paperback)

About the Book

Encompassing anthropology, history, exploration, travelogue, and memoir, the celebrated author of "A Match to the Heart" now takes readers on an extraordinary journey into the heart of the land of ice. A "New York Times" Notable Book. Drawings throughout.

Book Synopsis

Greenland lies at the heart of Gretel Ehrlich's decade-long fascination with landscape, culture, and survival. This Cold Heaven weaves travel, history, and cultural anthropology to bring the island's people, terrain, and elemental beauty vividly to life, revealing an Arctic world rarely seen from within.

"Thrilling. . . . A stunning portrait of a people and the landscape that shaped them." -The New York Times Book Review

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 Heaven is at once a thrilling adventure story and a meditation on the clarity of life at the extreme edge of the world.

Review Quotes

"Thrilling. . . . A stunning portrait of a people and the landscape that shaped them." -The New York Times Book Review

"Told by a voice in love with the light and ice and rippling, infinite beauty of the Arctic north. This Cold Heaven boldly captures the unyielding beauty and spontaneous wonders of life on the icecap." --The Boston Globe

"Ehrlich has accomplished an extraordinary feat: she has taken a forbiddingly beautiful, haunting and alien landscape and depicted it in equally beautiful and haunting prose." -Seattle Times

"Gripping. [A] realm of gemlike icebergs, yowling sled dogs, writhing aurora borealis and stalwart, wisecracking hunters." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Haunting and reflective . . . captures the essence of the Artic." -Portland Oregonian

"Compelling. . . . At once an engaging history of the Inuit . . . and an affectionate profile of Ehrlich's Greenlandic friends and their vanishing way of life." -National Geographic

"Her adventures are wonderfully enlightening about the world way above the treeline. She writes beautifully." -The Washington Times

"No one who reads this wonderful book will ever forget these singular people or the austerities of the land they inhabit." -Thomas McGuane

"Get Ehrlich on a sled racing across unknown ice and she'll carry you bodily into another place and time, another fast-disappearing way of life." -Ann Jones, The Women's Review of Books

"A lyrical blend of travel, meditation and history . . . [and] a hymn to the Inuit people's rootedness in landscape and tradition." --Times Literary Supplement

"[Ehrlich's] does a masterful job of creating a nuanced sense of place."-Conde Nast Traveler

About the Author

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