Arctic Dreams

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Arctic Dreams

Barry Lopez

Travel & Adventure

Jul 29, 2018

The elemental purity of extreme landscapes presents a field for action—indeed, for existence itself—that is wondrous and terrifying, stripped of life’s familiar props and comforts. No book captures this quality with more concentration than Arctic Dreams. “It is precisely because the regimes of light and time in the Arctic are so different,” Lopez writes, “that the landscape is able to expose in startling ways the complacency of our thought about land in general.” And not just about land, but about creation in all its vast scale and intimate detail. The product of nearly five years’ travel as a field biologist in the Arctic, from the Bering Strait in the west to the Davis Strait in the east, Lopez’s narrative invites us to observe—and celebrate—the glorious particularities of nature and culture that distinguish what at first appear to be nothing more than “great, unrelieved stretches of snow and ice.” Reviewing this book for the New York Times, the esteemed nature writer Edward Abbey rightly called it “jubilant,” and aptly described Lopez as a man “who can’t wait to get up in the morning. What is prodigious about him is not so much his travels, which are impressive, but how happy he is in the course of them.”

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Chuck Munro

Dec 12, 2021

Scientific observations of perhaps the most unappreciated aspect of our planet tht somehow touches our heart with near poetic language.

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