Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape - Hardcover

Barry Lopez

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684185784 ISBN 13: 9780684185781

Publisher: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1986

Synopsis

A portrait of the landscape, animals, and people of the Arctic captures the beauty and peril of this harsh region and explains what an understanding of this unknown land means to the modern, urbanized world

About this title

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.

From the Inside Flap

s National Book Award-winning classic study of the Far North is widely considered his masterpiece.

Lopez offers a thorough examination of this obscure world-its terrain, its wildlife, its history of Eskimo natives and intrepid explorers who have arrived on their icy shores. But what turns this marvelous work of natural history into a breathtaking study of profound originality is his unique meditation on how the landscape can shape our imagination, desires, and dreams. Its prose as hauntingly pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is nothing less than an indelible classic of modern literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: Charles Scribner & Sons
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0684185784
• ISBN 13: 9780684185781
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464