Like the adventurer who circled an iceberg to see it on all sides, Mariana Gosnell, former Newsweek reporter and author of Zero Three Bravo, a book about flying a small plane around the United States, explores ice in all its complexity, grandeur, and significance.More brittle than glass, at times stronger than steel, at other times flowing like molasses, ice covers 10 percent of the earth’s land and 7 percent of its oceans. In nature it is found in myriad forms, from the delicate needle ice that crunches underfoot in a winter meadow to the massive, centuries-old ice that forms the world’s glaciers. Scientists theorize that icy comets delivered to Earth the molecules needed to get life started, and ice ages have shaped much of the land as we know it.Here is the whole world of ice, from the freezing of Pleasant Lake in New Hampshire to the breakup of a Vermont river at the onset of spring, from the frozen Antarctic landscape that emperor penguins inhabit to the cold, watery route bowhead whales take between Arctic ice floes. Mariana Gosnell writes about frostbite and about the recently discovered 5,000-year-old body of a man preserved in an Alpine glacier. She discusses the work of scientists who extract cylinders of Greenland ice to study the history of the earth’s climate and try to predict its future. She examines ice in plants, icebergs, icicles, and hail; sea ice and permafrost; ice on Mars and in the rings of Saturn; and several new forms of ice developed in labs. She writes of the many uses humans make of ice, including ice-skating, ice fishing, iceboating, and ice climbing; building ice roads and seeding clouds; making ice castles, ice cubes, and iced desserts. Ice is a sparkling illumination of the natural phenomenon whose ebbs and flows over time have helped form the world we live in. It is a pleasure to read, and important to read—for its natural science and revelations about ice’s influence on our everyday lives, and for what it has to tell us about our environment today and in the future.
Ice
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Eskimos have more than a dozen words for sea ice; compared with Gosnell, they're downright thrifty. A self-professed "pagophile" ("lover of ice"), Gosnell exhausts the matter of frozen water in this needlessly long and maddeningly repetitive tome. A former Newsweek science reporter and author of Zero Three Bravo, she writes smoothly and wrings a measure of interest from her various subjects—sea ice, lake ice, river ice, space ice, ice games, frostbite, John Wayne Bobbitt (yes, that Mr. Bobbitt). But this book is an often mystifying precipitate of facts, curious words and anecdotes that could be slashed in half with no ill effect. The book also suffers from an overdose of distracting literary quotations on nearly every page. To be sure, ice is not a trivial substance. At the caps it locks up the vast majority of the world's fresh water; it confounds land and sea travel and commerce; it's a major hazard and a major source of winter fun. All this Gosnell argues convincingly. The trouble is, she's like a speed skater who can't stop going in circles. 16 pages of photos. (Nov. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Former Newsweek reporter Gosnell is an attentive and patient observer who traveled around the globe for this compendium of the human and natural history of ice. She opens with a description of the sound and sight of a small lake freezing, expanding from there to discuss the seasonal advance and retreat of ice, as on the Great Lakes or Lake Baikal. Taking the next natural step, the persistence of ice through the summer, brings Gosnell to the 1800s origin of glaciology in Louis Agassiz's study of Mont Blanc's Mer de Glace, and subsequently into the contemporary specialty of ice cores in ice-age research. En route through the science, which Gosnell condenses from the technical literature, the author imparts eclectic information through excerpts from poems, adventure and disaster stories, and discussions of ice sports and diversions. Gosnell conducts a bright, curious, and omnidirectional tour that will entrance nature readers. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Corrective to Publishers Weekly,
By Noblejay (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (Hardcover)
As a friend of the author, I feel an appropriate corrective to the Publishers Weekly review would be either of the two very positive New York Times' reviews, one of which says...."this astonishingly boring-sounding book turns out instead to be an astonishment: an engaging, literate, mischievously written and only occasionally maddening voyage, far beyond everything most readers might possibly have wanted to know about hard water."
Neal Karlen , December 26, 2005, Books of The Times
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Substance of Life in Solid Form,
By
This review is from: Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (Hardcover)
This book is just plan amazing. One would think that no one could write a 560 page book on frozen water and make it not only interesting, but fascinating. I found myself turning the pages and reading despite myself. Mariana Gossnell has a style that leads one on from wonder to wonder. Indeed "Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance" is a masterpiece of science writing. From a pond freezing over in winter to the ice on Jupiter's moon Europa and the ice in comets (indeed at least half of the water currently on earth may have originated in these deep space travelers) here is everything everyone might have ever wanted to know about this amazing substance and a lot more beside. Gossnell introduces us to ice in human history, its associations with living things, its uses and its origins. With a lot of ice (the world's glaciers and Greenland's ice cap among others) now melting apparently due to global warming, this is a very timely book.
Water has always fascinated me and this book just confirms the wonder that is water in all of its forms. It is a truism that without water life simply would not exist on the planet. DNA may be the molecule that determines life, but water is the molecule that allows it, at least in a form that we know. If you think the subject boring, read "Ice" and be surprised! I recommend it highly.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Everything you never thought you'd need to know about ice,
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This review is from: Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (Hardcover)
"ICE" is of interest to a very few people. It gets into the nitty gritty of all things snowy and cold.
It is well-written but I can't imagine the average reader really getting into the esoterica of how frozen lakes form or the difference between a frozen lake and a frozen river. The book even gets into how a frozen lake breaks up. The historical notes are interesting but again, not for everyone. In short, this is the kind of book only a nerd such as myself would love.
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