4.0 out of 5 stars
Going off-piste in pursuit of the truth about snow, February 16, 2010
This review is from: The Snow Tourist: A Search for the World's Purest, Deepest Snowfall (Paperback)
Snow can become "an agent of power and fear" in artworks and in life, as Charlie English tells us in his tour of some of the world's snowiest places. It can also give those who see it, live and play in it, a sense of wonder and joy, and it's to English's credit that he captures both sides of this -- the exhilaration of rushing down a mountain slope on a snowboard and the paralyzing fear that sweeps over him while following a contemptuous mountain guide across some of the most treacherous snowy terrain in the European Alps.
English has some marvellous descriptions for the snow he encounters ("a souffle of frozen cloud), and some fascinating vignettes of the places he goes. And he covers a lot of ground, both geographically (he visits Baffin Island and learns how to build an igloo; museums in Vienna to study snowy art works and Vermont, to pay homage to the man who studied the makeup of the snowflake. The result is part memoir, part travel story, part nature/science book, and partly about winter sports. But that hodge podge means that it never really succeeds triumphantly as being a wonderful book in any one of those genres. Instead, what I found was a quirky, often entertaining book about snow and English's relationship with it. Much of it was great; parts I ended up feeling were superfluous, such as repeated references to childhood memories. Still, English wraps up all of his loose ends neatly by the time the book finishes, including resolving a personal dilemma about his need for space and the wilds which the world's snowiest places seem to him to symbolize. (Don't be put off by the fact that the book doesn't live up to its title as the author's quest for the world's "purest, deepest snowfall" -- approach it as a reflection of the author's relationship with snow more generally, and it will still be rewarding.
GREATLY missing from this book were photographs! English writes about the photographic studies done of snowflakes, but these aren't reproduced; he waxes rhapsodic about Breughel's winter snowscape but there's no plate of it to refer to. A big raspberry to the publishers for skimping on that front, in a book that clearly would have benefitted from some snow images.
This was an intriguing book to read, and one I'll dip into again, but it's one that only winter sports addicts will really cherish, I suspect. Recommended primarily to those, and also to fans of the "who knew?" genre of books about quirky things, like Kurlansky's book about codfish.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of snow, but not much deep or pure, November 30, 2009
This review is from: The Snow Tourist: A Search for the World's Purest, Deepest Snowfall (Paperback)
Charlie English, author of The Snow Tourist: is stuck in London with his young family, yearning for snow.
Like English, I'm a 40-ish male and a huge snow fan. I get what he's after. I'm disappointed in his search.
There's a lot of great information here, from the history of skiing to the art history of snow. Who knew that the woodblock prints of snow by the Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige were a main inspiration for the birth of European Impressionism?
Or that Ull and Skrodi were the Norse gods of skiing?
I was disappointed, however, in the author's "search for the world's purest, deepest snowfall." That subtitle got me all fired up, but the author doesn't search all that hard. Let's just say he was not very methodical about it. In the detailed 24-page "Snow Almanac" at the end of the book, English lists "10 snowy places," from the Chugach Mountains of Alaska to Mount Hutt in New Zealand. Yet in two years of field research, he only visits two of these places.
Rather than head straight for the snowiest places, English goes to places associated with snow. Baffin Island, as he writes, gets about 80 inches of snow per year, similar to Duluth. He flies there in spring and goes out into the bush with an Inuit man named Billy to build and sleep in a traditional igloo. Afterward, English heads for Jericho, Vermont, to trace the history of Wilson Bentley, known for his microphotographs of snow crystals. Other snowy adventures include a failed ski crossing of the Alps and a weekend break in Vienna to view paintings of snow (like his favorite, Bruegel's The Hunters in the Snow).
When English does get to a snowy place, like Alaska's Chugach Mountains or Mount Rainier, he's there overnight and gets out on a snowboard or snowshoes for a brief adventure.
While the search for pure, deep snow comes up far short of its destination, the journey is worth it for all the things English and the reader learn along the way, about snow, history, and himself.
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