About this title: A portrait of the Arctic that celebrates the landscape, wildlife and people of the vast and mysterious region. Above all, it is a story of light - solar and lunar rings, halos and coronas, the aurora borealis, and the distant mountain that is actually a looming and convincing mirage.
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Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Trade paperback. Only good, with more than average condition problems for its age. Book has been read but remains straight, clean, and tight. No internal markings. Reprint. 1988. Trade paperback. read more
Description: Bantam 1989. Winner of the National Book Award. Previous Owners Name Inside Front Cover. Loose Binding. Light Wear. Spot on FEP. All books in VG or better condition. read more
Description: Good+ to Very Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. P. 453-454 Index page detached but present, crease lines down mid spine, covers lightly edgeworn. (Author of Of Wolves and Men). 464 pages. read more
"What a knowing and writing of one of the most vast, special and fragile/tough places on earth that I have had the priviledge and pleasure of coming to know. Thank you, Wendy for bringing your copy along on our summer trek/canoe trip along the Jago. Thank you, Barry, for your profound and well written understanding and advocacy of and for this piece of our world."
"Perhaps it was the fascination of "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon" on television or Howard Hawks' "The Thing from Another World" on the big screen but ever since I was very young, I've had a sweaty-palm attraction for the Far North. The Arctic, a place so alien, so harsh, and yet so beautiful, it defied my imagination. It's an allure that has killed many and made heroes of others.
Winner of the 1986 National Book Award, "Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape" by Barry Lopez is considered perhaps the best book ever written on that wondrous, yet intrinsically deadly place. Lopez spent years traveling there and writing about its animals: polar bears, narwhals, beluga whales, musk oxen and caribou and the indigenous people that must survive in the unforgiving vastness of it all, day after day.
Lopez writes about the Inuit:
"Eskimos do not maintain this intimacy with nature without paying a certain price. When I have thought about the ways in which they differ from people in my own culture, I have realized that they are more afraid than we are. On a day-to-day basis, they have more fear. Not of being dumped into cold water from an 'umiak,' not a debilitating fear. They are afraid because they accept fully what is violent and tragic in nature. It is a fear tied to their knowledge that sudden, cataclysmic events are as much a part of life, of really living, as are the moments when one pauses to look at something beautiful. A Central Eskimo shaman named Aua, queried by Knud Rasmussen about Eskimo beliefs answered, 'We do not believe. We fear.'"
"To extend these thoughts, it is wrong to think of hunting cultures like the Eskimo's as living in perfect harmony or balance with nature. Their regard for animals and their attentiveness to nuance in the landscape were not rigorous or complete enough to approach an idealized harmony. No one knew that much. No one would say they knew that much. They faced nature with fear, with 'ilira' (nervous awe) and 'kappia' (apprehension). And with enthusiasm.""
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