Description: In the summer of 1993, Gretel Ehrlich traveled to this land of light and darkness -- and was simply struck by its utter beauty. She found the history and culture of the Inuit people to be profoundly fascinating, and their ability to joyfully endure the most dire of conditions deeply inspiring. For seven seasons, Ehrlich journeyed throughout the island by dogsled, in the searing cold, in the most extreme of conditions, sustained by the warmth of her guides and the villagers she encountered along the way. She writes: "It was on the ice that I saw the wild genius and second-sight of the Eskimos traveling by dogsled and hunting every day to feed themselves, their families, and their dogs -- twenty or more of them. The complexities of ice had taught them to reconcile the imminence of famine and death with an irreverent joy at being alive. The landscape itself, with its shifting and melting ice, its mirages, glaciers, and drifting icebergs is a description, not of the horror of sparseness, but an ode to the beauty of impermanence." Interweaved with the equally fascinating accounts of Knud Rasmussen, the legendary Danish-Inuit explorer who mapped the northernmost areas of Greenland, "This Cold Heaven" is one of the most compelling and evocative portraits of one of the last unexplored spaces on the planet.

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