The Beluga Cafe : An Arctic Expedition in Search of Art and Whales

This is a very powerful book. It is not the typical wilderness adventure book. Unlike the TV nature show, amazing things don't happen every few mintutes. In fact few amazing things happen at all, yet the whole experience of small wilderness experiences add up to a book that will take you to another place. "It seems critical to me to devote some part of each year to this nothingness, this time without time, this confrontation with animal demons real and imagined, learning once again how to surrender to some internal environment made external." Nollman confronts the question of us versus them strongly in this book with the us being modern society and them being animals, nature and native cultures. He feels the chance has been lost to learn from "them" in a way that everyone would benefit, instead of disregarding that knowledge and destroying it. Chapter 15 begins with a wonderful quote by Carl Safina from Song for the Blue Ocean. "Ecosystems are now like history books with many of the pages ripped out. And when people come along there is no way for them to know what was on those torn-out pages. Their values are not constructed around the abundance that once filled those holes. They accept the blank parts as though they've always been there." Nollman pulls no punches in what he experiences on this trip including describing the constant difficult and loving give and take among the three soujourners. This is a strong book and well worth the time to read it.

This is a quite wonderful story.... a music of words.... ebbing and flowing between near-surreal and ultra-surreal with only a few intrusions of pure didactic rationalism. Buy it and read it.