This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland

Readers wanting to spend more time on the icy surface of Greenland could do no better than selecting Ehrlich as their guide. A naturalist and essayist, she has spent years exploring the world's largest island and shares its harsh yet wondrous landscape. She crosses the island by dog sled, plane, and kayak in the company of a shifting set of comrades, leading readers around the vast echoing space, explicating the weather, and offering crystalline descriptions of light, ice, and cold. Balanced against her modern expeditions are the journeys of Knud Rasmussen, an explorer and ethnographer who traveled the island in the first part of the 20th Century recording the culture of the Inuits. The combined perspectives and her lyric sensibility join to create a work that is poetic and ruminative while at the same time gripping and adventurous.