Dispatches from the End of Ice: Essays - Hardcover

Peterson, Beth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595348999 ISBN 13: 9781595348999

Publisher: Trinity University Press, 2019

Synopsis

The future of the world's ice is at a critical juncture, marked by international debate about climate change and almost daily reports about glaciers and ice shelves breaking, oceans rising, and temperatures spiking across the globe. For Beth Peterson, the discourse around these quickly-changing landscapes became personal.  A few months after Peterson moved to a tiny village on the edge of Europe's largest glacier, things began to disappear. The glacier was melting at breakneck pace, and people she knew vanished: her professor went missing while summiting a volcano in Japan, and a friend wandered off a mountain trail in Norway. Finally, Peterson took a harrowing forty-foot fall while ice climbing.

Peterson's effort to make sense of these losses led to travels across Scandinavia, Italy, England and back to the United States. She visited a cryonics institute, an ice core lab, a wunderkammer, Wittgenstein's cabin, and other museums and libraries. She spoke with historians, guides, and scientists in search of answers. Her search for a noted glacier museum in Norway led to news that the renowned building had set on fire in the middle of the night and burned to the ground.

Dispatches from the End of Ice is part science, part lyric essay, and part research reportage--all structured around a series of found artifacts (a map, a museum, an inventory, a book) in an attempt to understand the idea of disappearance. It is a brilliant synthesis of science, storytelling, and research in the spirit of essayists like Robert Macfarlane, John McPhee, and Joni Tevis. Peterson's work veers into numerous terrains, orbiting the idea of vanishing and the taxonomies of loss both in an unstable world and in our individual lives.

About this title

About the Author:

Beth Peterson is an assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Post Road, the Mid-American Review, the Pinch, Newfound, Passages North, Flyway, Sky Island Journal, Alchemy, the Great Lakes Review, and the Ocean State Review. She's been a finalist for the Non/Fiction Collection Book Prize, Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Contest, Obsidian Prize, and Cleveland State Poetry Center essay collection competition. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Missouri.

Review:

"Her omnivorous curiosity is fascinating." ⁠― Elizabeth Dodd, author of In the Mind's Eye

“Following the trails Peterson maps, you don’t so much find your way to and from the northern latitudes as get lost in them along with her―lost in a way that makes you look around in wonderment, gratitude, and grief." ― Donovan Hohn, author of Moby Duck

About this edition

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1595348999
• ISBN 13: 9781595348999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280