This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland

This ethnographic study and travel guide about Greenland reminds me of Paul Theroux' "Happy Isles Of Oceania" which I read about 10 years ago; also her compressed prose reminds me of Annie Proulx author of "Close Range" with whom she shared the adopted state of Wyoming, also of James Michener, author of "Alaska". I have also read this author's "Heart Mountain" which I enjoyed a lot,and more recently "The Future Of Ice". . Ehrlich's frequent plane trips between Copenhagen and Greenland and her stopovers at the state-of-the-art American military base at Thule, Greenland give the book a link to the outside world, but beyond the airports she transports the reader to a culture many thousands of years old and also with a multitude of current social problems based on the clash between the Danish, who arrived in the 18th C., and indigeneous cultures. She interviews numerous Danes with Eskimo blood or vice versa, or other expatriates, including information on an American artist Rockwell Kent, who decided to give up on modern society in favor of some more ancient or traditional values. Hence they become New Age subsistence hunters in Greenland. The book also includes several interesting chapters on the explorations of the Arctic by the Dane Rasmussen in the 1920's, who did his own ethnographic studies, as well as by other less renowned explorers. Rasmussen travelled all the way across the Canadian Arctic from Greenland to Alaska. You will be impressed with the breadth of knowledge Ehrlich has about her subject as well as her anecdotal knowledge of modern astronomy; really this is her own ethnographic study, and you will be surprised at the countless small details of living in such an unusually cold, white climate with polar seasons that include many months of total darkness or total light, and the great importance of dogs and dogsleds in their culture. One of the obvious consequences of living in -30-40 degree temperatures is the layers of clothing a human must wear, not to mention the Eskimos' unusual food choices,the threats of starvation and the resultant cannibalism, and age-old hunting practices. Really an eye-opener for those who live in the middle latitudes.

There are books and then there are "fulcrum" books. "This ColdHeaven" is one of those that tips the reader into a place andpeople that changes the light with which the world is seen. The Greenland that Gretel Ehrlich describes will never be experienced by the vast number of us (thankfully so, for its own sake), but no reader will ever doubt the impact of the beauty and harshness of the Arctic environment on those who live there. To convey to us a sense of that remote place and its animals and the Inuit people is Ehrlich's passion and her genius. Unlike some writers who spend a few months in research and then write with mock authority, her voice has been Greenland-seasoned seven times since 1993. Her view is subtle and encompassing, yet leavened with the humility of one who comes from the outside looking in.Ehrlich's writing style is richly poetic, strong in metaphorand allusion. By interrupting her own lyric voice with the deliberate descriptions of early Arctic explorers, she creates a blend of the fanciful and the matter-of-fact that broadly reflects the Inuit view of life, past and present. In the end, however, and inspite of her admiration for the subsitence hunter, she squarely questions the viability of the traditional lifestyle in the face of modern consumerism. The answer, Ehrlich suggests, is the one we've come to expect and, tragically, to accept.Lest the reader fancies that traveling to Greenland to samplea subsistence life is a good idea, hold on to this: you don't belong there. Let this book be your window and yourmirror. Use it to visit a wisdom that, with any luck, mayaffect you at your very core.

This woman truly loves the high north, with all its paradox and ambivalence . . . Erlich paints the beauty and complexity of northern Greenland (before reading this book it never occurred to me to think of Greenland as HAVING a "north" and "south"!) and the struggle a tiny minority are having to maintain their ancient -- and sustainable -- ways of life. I'd classify this first of all as a love story between woman and land, but it is a love story in which the sentient observer is aware of the problems with the beloved, and yet still remains committed. This is not a "been there, seen that, got the T-shirt" travel book -- Erlich is drawn to Greenland no fewer than seven times, in various seasons, and she lives with the people in traditional housing (including tents on the ice). She encounters the brutality of bureaucracy as well as the incredible hospitality of the Inuit -- and at the same time she does not shrink from the pervasive alcoholism and domestic violence that are a sad feature of northern life, nor does she neglect to mention the impact even in Greenland of the growing pollution in "the south" (i.e. North America). Her thesis is essentially Romantic in a philosophic sense . . . subsistence living was/is hard but authentic. The coming of modernity, with its internet connection, TV, store-bought goods, etc., has removed both the means and the incentive for a life of integrity. She leaves it to the reader to see the Greenlandic experience as paradigmatic of the wider world. Read this book - it will lift your heart and trouble your mind, and leave you wanting more.

Having spent two weeks on a ship last August travelling from Kangerlussuaq to Siorapaluk and back, it was great to see the magnificance of Greenland through another's eyes. Ehrlich describes her seven seasons in Greenland, but the book is also interspersed with accounts of the adventures of the "greats" who explored the Arctic--Rasmussen, Freuchen, and Kent. The author has a keen sense of the beauty of the Arctic and its people.

Greenland isn't green at all, but the world's largest island is covered by the biggest continental ice shelf in the world. Sparsely populated on the rocky outer fringes of its 840,000 square miles, it's probably as unknown to Americans as anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Gretel Ehrlich knows its ice leads and midnight sun as well as any American, and probably as well as any non-Inuit except for a handful of Danes, whose territory it is. That's because she's obsessed with the North in general and with Greenland in particular. Over the past decade, she has traveled to the frozen island at least seven times, staying for months at a stretch, traveling long distances by dogsled, making friends with hunters and villagers, and participating in seal and polar bear hunts. Erlich chronicles her trips and relationships in a new book called "This Cold Heaven." ((...) 377 pages, Pantheon Books) She does far more than record her own journeys, however. She also puts Greenland into cultural, historical, and anthropological perspective by weaving her trips with those of Knud Rasmussen, who died in 1933 after traversing the polar North from Greenland to Alaska. Even now, some of Greenlandic culture is largely unchanged from the days when Rasmussen and his close friend Peter Freuchen made "first" contact with some of the bands of isolated Inuit (Eskimos) on the island. Bears, seals, hare, fox and walrus are still hunted for food, clothing and fuel made from blubber, dogsled is still the chief method of land transport, and ancient stories and religion abound. There are modern encroachments, however - Danish bureaucracy, snowmobiles, alcohol, helicopters, and cars, to say nothing of the enormous American military base at Thule. Erlich is enticed by the old ways, which seem as pristine and "unbroken" as Greenland's vast ice. She is also enticed by the ice itself, communal life, the land, and the dramatic ways with which Inuit culture deals with a nature it cannot dominate. Her own use of language sometimes approaches the poetic, which isn't so surprising when you learn that she's a poet, too. Using the specialized language of poetry, Erlich is able to render what might seem a static and frozen environment into one that lives and breathes on the page. She's at her best when she describes the physical world, whether populated by other humans at the time or only by 25 varieties of ice, snow, and the midnight sun. She does a good job, too, of delving into the lives of both exiled Danes and Greenlanders, and when she doesn't know something, she's not afraid to say so. More often than not, she finds out and lets the reader know. Sometimes, I found certain facts repeated and wasn't sure why. Not a huge deal, but distracting. Also, I would have liked to know a little more about the personal relationships Erlich cultivated on the island, although that wasn't the purpose of the book, and is almost a compliment, rather than a criticism, because I found her s