Arctic Dreams (Paperback)

by Barry Lopez (Author) "ON A WINTER AFTERNOON-a day without a sunrise, under a moon that had not set for six days-I stand on the frozen ocean 20 miles..." (more)
Key Phrases: polar bear biologists, belukha whale, floe edge, North America, Bering Sea, Lancaster Sound (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Based on 15 extended trips to the Canadian far north over a five-year period, Arctic Dreams celebrates the mysteries of what documentarians fondly call "last frontiers." Such places are everywhere in danger of destruction in the interest of ever-elusive economic progress, but Lopez writes no jeremiads. Instead, he aims to foster a kind of learned understanding of wild places, in this case the vast, scarcely knowable northern landscape. Writing of the natural history of the Arctic and its inhabitants--narwhals, polar bears, beluga whales, musk oxen, and caribou among them--Lopez draws powerful lessons from the land and imparts them assuredly and gracefully. Arctic Dreams deservedly won a National Book Award in 1986 when it was first published. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
This is one of the finest books ever written about the Far North, warmly appreciative and understanding of the natural forces that shape life in an austere landscape. The prize-winning author (Of Wolves and Men spent four years in Arctic regions: traveling between Davis Strait in the east and Bering Strait in the west, hunting with Eskimos and accompanying archeologists, biologists and geologists in the field. Lopez became enthralled by the power of the Arctic, a power he observes derives from "the tension between its beauty and its capacity to take life." This is a story of light, darkness and ice; of animal migrations and Eskimos; of the specter of development and the cultural perception of a region. Examining the literature of 19th century exploration, Lopez finds a disassociation from the actual landscape; explorers have tended to see the Arctic as an adversary. Peary and Stefansson left as a troubling legacy the attitude that the landscape could be labeled, then manipulated. Today, he contends, an imaginative, emotional approach to the Arctic is as important as a rational, scientific one. Lopez has written a wonderful, compelling defense of the Arctic wilderness. Illustrations. BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375727485
• ISBN-13: 978-0375727481
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #16,398 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #1 in	Books > Travel > Polar Regions > Arctic
  #11 in	Books > Outdoors & Nature > Nature Writing
  #15 in	Books > Science > Nature & Ecology > Natural History

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Desert Island book, April 27, 2004

By	Ryan McNabb (Ooltewah, TN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Funny that a book about the Arctic would be on my "Desert Island" list, but this is one of the most effecting things I've read in my life. It's one thing to write a book about a region that explains it to the reader. It's quite another thing to write a book about a region that truly makes you feel as if you are there, that you understand it, that you "get it". The Eskimos have something like 25 words for snow. They can draw incredibly detailed maps of coastlines, from memory. On and on, the people and places are introduced to you, like visitors to your home, and you really begin to understand what it is to live in such a cold, beautiful place. The story of one Eskimo hunter will never leave me: he was hunting, and somehow became stranded on a broken off piece of ice. It floated away, with him on it, into the mist. All he had was his knife, made of bone. His friends searched for him, to no avail, and he was given up for dead. But he came back, years later, in a kayak he'd made, fully outfitted with warm clothes he'd also made, fat and happy and completely in tune with his environment, absolutely as at home there as the polar bear. He could make everything he needed, just from what this supposedly "barren" wasteland provided. That may not sound like much, but put yourself in his shoes (or mukluks) and you'll begin to feel the cold and the quiet close in around you.

That's what this book does for you. It puts you there.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arctic dreaming in the Arizona desert., June 21, 2001

By	G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Arctic Dreams: Imagination And Desire In A Northern Landscape (Paperback)

In the book that first got me hooked on his writing, Barry Lopez writes, "I looked out over the Bering Sea and brought my hands folded to the breast of my parka and bowed from the waist deeply toward the north, that great straight filled with life, the ice and water. I held the bow to the pale sulphur sky at the northern rim of the earth. I held the bow until my back ached, and my mind was emptied of its categories and designs, its plans and speculations. I bowed before the simple evidence of the moment in my life in a tangible place on the earth that was beautiful" (p. 414).

In THE POWER OF MYTH (1988), Joseph Campbell says that when we destroy nature and the revelations of nature, we destroy our own nature, too. "What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." This belief is the heartbeat of ARCTIC DREAMS. In his Preface, Lopez writes that "it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us" (p. xxviii). There are three themes at the center of his narrative: "the influence of the arctic landscape on the human imagination. How a desire to put a landscape to use shapes our evaluation of it. And, confronted by an unknown landscape, what happens to our sense of wealth. What does it mean to grow rich?" (p. 13).

Whether he is contemplating "the innocence" (p. 74) of muskoxen, the "intricate life of the polar bear" (p. 411), narwhals, migration, sea ice, or arctic light, Lopez has the ability to bring us to the edges of our senses. "This is an old business," he writes, "walking slowly over the land in anticipation of what lies hidden in it. The eye alights suddenly on something bright in the grass--the chitinous shell of an insect. The nose tugs at a minute blossom for some trace of arctic perfume. The hands turn over an odd bone, extrapolating, until the animal is discovered in the mind and seen to be moving in the land. One finds anomalous stones to puzzle over, and in footprints and broken spiderwebs the traces of irretrievable events" (p. 254). For Lopez, the Arctic region is "rich with metaphor, with adumbration. In a simple bow from the waist before the nest of the horned lark, you are able to stake your life, again, in what you dream" (p. xxix). He finds the "classic lines of a desert landscape" in the Arctic: "spare, balanced, extended, and quiet" (p. xxiii). This land is like poetry, Lopez observes: "it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life" (p. 274).

The Arctic region is a microcosm of the large-scale advance of Western culture, oil, gas and mineral industries upon the planet, "a disquieting reminder" that we are "on a course as disastrously short-lived as was that of the whaling industry" (p. 11). Lopez writes, "to contemplate what people are doing out here and ignore the universe of the seal, to consider human quest and plight and not know the land, to not listen to it, seemed fatal. Not perhaps for tomorrow, or next year, but fatal if you looked down the long road of our determined evolution" (p. 13). As this book proves, Barry Lopez is nature writng at its best.

G. Merritt

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The finest 'nature book' written, May 28, 1998

By	George Durkee (Twain Harte, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Arctic Dreams: Imagination And Desire In A Northern Landscape (Paperback)

I've read a lot of nature writing--from Thoreau, Muir, Dillard etc. Lopez is the keenest observer and the most lyrical writer. (not to slight Muir, incidentally, but 19th century lyricism is hard for some to get used to...).

I've been a backcountry ranger for 28 years and, I like to think, have an appreciation for wilderness and observation of the natural world. Lopez is able to describe what I see.