The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold

by Gretel Ehrlich

Book Overview

This book was written out of Gretel Ehrlich's love for winter-for remote and cold places, for the ways winter frees our imagination and invigorates our feet, mind, and soul-and also out of the fear... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 037542251X
• ISBN13: 9780375422515
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

very prompt service!

I received an immediate email from shipper and received the book within 2 business days. A used book in very good condition, along with a card thanking me for my order Five *****!

this is a wonderful book

This is a tightly wrought and beautiful work or life and art, poetical, arresting, trasportive. As a westerner, and lover of cold it really spoke to me. The brittle cold of the author's loneliness seduces your own heart to face itself. It is a beautiful book, but not an easy one. While the book is supposedly about global warming, it is truly about much much more. How anyone could give it a low rating due in part to a disagreement about climate prediction is beyond me. I highly recommend this book.

another great Ehrich book

Excellent book about cold places, global warming, life and solitude. another great book for Gretel. this is another keeper for my library. I loved it.

A very refreshing read.

I recently completed reading this book while travelling in Iceland and the Faroes last week. And I picked up this book at a bookstore in Reykjavik. Clearly Gretel is a strongly worded and passionate writer. But while she was able to connect with me while talking about her hikes (and her dog, Sammy; I lost my own doggie about a month ago), she quite often seems to go on a rant. Sometimes I just skimmed over words without attempting to grasp what she was saying. She does not describe any flora and fauna in detail but I don't think that was the intention of this book (read Barry Lopez's "Arctic Dreams" for that). But all that sounds like nitpicking. It is not often you come across a book by someone who obviously has travelled so extensively or loves winter so much. Make this your next read while travelling across the northern Atlantic next time.

" Little Blonde Buddha" On Ice, Cold, & Global Warming

As one of the Arctic scientists in this book readily admits, it is a bit hard to combine all the diverse facts on global warming into a coherent theory. Like Voltaire, this book seems to contain a lot of diverse informatiion in a relatively short space: it is clearly liberal in its political focus, with a number of disparaging comments about the extent of capitalistic exploitation of the environment, but hopeful that man can change his ways. But most of all, it is eclectic in all of its numerous quotes about cold from numerous cultures including Western, Far Eastern, and numerous pagan cultures. They seem to dominate her long essay and sometimes seem to distract from it. I particularly enjoyed her references to Zen Buddhism. She also offers some anecdotal scientific comments on modern astronomy, as she did in her previous book "This Cold Heaven" about Greenland; her comments on glacial history are a bit weaker. In this book and the former one, she shows a strong familiarity with extremes of cold and snow which most of us lack. She manages to keep her focus on cold climates and the nature of ice throughout, and uses this one climate as the strongest evidence for the reality of global warming. Later I saw the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" which helped my understanding of this book. "Future Of Ice" is also a travel book: it is divided into 3 main parts and several smaller sections: the first is a backpacking trip she took with a friend to view the (shrinking) glaciers of Patagonia at South America's tip; the second is about several winters spent with friends in her adopted state of Wyoming, including a highly naturalistic canoe trip she took down a river in the middle of winter, and her reflections on cabin living; the third is a trip to the Russian Arctic or Barents Sea she took with a variety of research comrades including artists, scientists, and filmmakers and in which she comments on polar bears, walruses, the bearded seal, and various birds nesting areas,pollution; other scientists from the Arctic also offer their own conclusions on global warming. She also reflects philosophically on the human and her own condition--on the nature of love and of being alone, for example. All of these diverse commentaries plus her unwavering focus on cold climates make this remarkable little book both loosely knit and "tight" simultaneously. Somewhat coincidentally she claims to have opposed the Iraq War. The book is not strictly speaking scientific,more meditational, though she does offer quite a bit of scientific evidence.