Rating: 
Summary: Desert Island book
Review: Funny that a book about the Arctic would be on my "Desert Island" list, but this is one of the most effecting things I've read in my life. It's one thing to write a book about a region that explains it to the reader. It's quite another thing to write a book about a region that truly makes you feel as if you are there, that you understand it, that you "get it". The Eskimos have something like 25 words for snow. They can draw incredibly detailed maps of coastlines, from memory. On and on, the people and places are introduced to you, like visitors to your home, and you really begin to understand what it is to live in such a cold, beautiful place. The story of one Eskimo hunter will never leave me: he was hunting, and somehow became stranded on a broken off piece of ice. It floated away, with him on it, into the mist. All he had was his knife, made of bone. His friends searched for him, to no avail, and he was given up for dead. But he came back, years later, in a kayak he'd made, fully outfitted with warm clothes he'd also made, fat and happy and completely in tune with his environment, absolutely as at home there as the polar bear. He could make everything he needed, just from what this supposedly "barren" wasteland provided. That may not sound like much, but put yourself in his shoes (or mukluks) and you'll begin to feel the cold and the quiet close in around you. That's what this book does for you. It puts you there.
Rating:
Summary: Desert Island book
Review: Funny that a book about the Arctic would be on my "Desert Island" list, but this is one of the most effecting things I've read in my life. It's one thing to write a book about a region that explains it to the reader. It's quite another thing to write a book about a region that truly makes you feel as if you are there, that you understand it, that you "get it". The Eskimos have something like 25 words for snow. They can draw incredibly detailed maps of coastlines, from memory. On and on, the people and places are introduced to you, like visitors to your home, and you really begin to understand what it is to live in such a cold, beautiful place. The story of one Eskimo hunter will never leave me: he was hunting, and somehow became stranded on a broken off piece of ice. It floated away, with him on it, into the mist. All he had was his knife, made of bone. His friends searched for him, to no avail, and he was given up for dead. But he came back, years later, in a kayak he'd made, fully outfitted with warm clothes he'd also made, fat and happy and completely in tune with his environment, absolutely as at home there as the polar bear. He could make everything he needed, just from what this supposedly "barren" wasteland provided. That may not sound like much, but put yourself in his shoes (or mukluks) and you'll begin to feel the cold and the quiet close in around you. That's what this book does for you. It puts you there.
Rating:
Summary: Science & Poetry ride together
Review: I came across this book at a New York street vendor. As i like this kind of literature, i bought it, and read at once..Lopez presents not only facts,but indeed he describes the experience of arctic people in relation to landscape - like the fact of being able to distinguish various hues of white - but also describes his experience. A must!
Rating:
Summary: I started fantasizing about moving North.
Review: I hate cold weather. I love trees and sunshine. But this book destroyed me. I couldn't quit reading, and next thing I knew, I had a new love; I love the Arctic. I had never been there, or had I? Barry brought me there, described the Arctic in perfection, and taught me to love a place I had never seen. This book is a great read. It is thouroughly enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: I started fantasizing about moving North.
Review: I hate cold weather. I love trees and sunshine. But this book destroyed me. I couldn't quit reading, and next thing I knew, I had a new love; I love the Arctic. I had never been there, or had I? Barry brought me there, described the Arctic in perfection, and taught me to love a place I had never seen. This book is a great read. It is thouroughly enjoyable.
Rating: 
Summary: Drags on and on.
Review: I have read numerous book on the Arctic, and this one, by far, is the worst. The reviews I'd read spoke of this sparking a love for the Arctic and inspiring them to learn more about the beauty of the Artic. I'd have to say I can't imagine how they got that. I could barely keep my eyes open trying to read this. The mind-numbing detail with which Lopez describes the latitudinal changes of light and soils and such is simply overbearing and excessive. This book inspired me only to put it down and read something else.
Rating:
Summary: Drags on and on.
Review: I have read numerous book on the Arctic, and this one, by far, is the worst. The reviews I'd read spoke of this sparking a love for the Arctic and inspiring them to learn more about the beauty of the Artic. I'd have to say I can't imagine how they got that. I could barely keep my eyes open trying to read this. The mind-numbing detail with which Lopez describes the latitudinal changes of light and soils and such is simply overbearing and excessive. This book inspired me only to put it down and read something else.
Rating: 
Summary: On being a polar bear
Review: I'm not sure just where the desire comes in here unless it's to promote or develop the reader's desire to see the Arctic for her- himself, but the imagination is the reader's. It's challenged and quickened. This book is an experience. Have you ever played the parlor game where you're supposed to tell which animal you'd prefer to be reincarnated as, and why? I'd never come up with a satisfactory animal, but I'd never thought of the Polar bear. I'd like to be a Polar bear. Their winter dens sound lovely and I can imagine cradling a cub in my arms, leaning back against an ice floe and gazing off across the Arctic Sea. I'd love wearing the translucent white fur coat. (I wouldn't want to deprive an animal of one, but I'd love to grow my own.) Swimming has always been a favorite activity of mine, too, and with the fur coat I don't suppose I'd mind the ice water! It's an amazing thing to empathize with an animal! Lopez's descriptions of the arctic ice and seasons, the people, the history and cultures, all are enchanting. It's a wonderfully magical world, so different from the lands and peoples of the rest of the world. Lopez carves that world into our imaginations as skillfully as the ice sculptor renders his tools. Summer is the perfect time to read this one; especially one of the hottest summers on record!
Rating:
Summary: The finest 'nature book' written
Review: I've read a lot of nature writing--from Thoreau, Muir, Dillard etc. Lopez is the keenest observer and the most lyrical writer. (not to slight Muir, incidentally, but 19th century lyricism is hard for some to get used to...). I've been a backcountry ranger for 28 years and, I like to think, have an appreciation for wilderness and observation of the natural world. Lopez is able to describe what I see.
Rating:
Summary: Arctic dreaming in the Arizona desert.
Review: In the book that first got me hooked on his writing, Barry Lopez writes, "I looked out over the Bering Sea and brought my hands folded to the breast of my parka and bowed from the waist deeply toward the north, that great straight filled with life, the ice and water. I held the bow to the pale sulphur sky at the northern rim of the earth. I held the bow until my back ached, and my mind was emptied of its categories and designs, its plans and speculations. I bowed before the simple evidence of the moment in my life in a tangible place on the earth that was beautiful" (p. 414). In THE POWER OF MYTH (1988), Joseph Campbell says that when we destroy nature and the revelations of nature, we destroy our own nature, too. "What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." This belief is the heartbeat of ARCTIC DREAMS. In his Preface, Lopez writes that "it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well. And in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us" (p. xxviii). There are three themes at the center of his narrative: "the influence of the arctic landscape on the human imagination. How a desire to put a landscape to use shapes our evaluation of it. And, confronted by an unknown landscape, what happens to our sense of wealth. What does it mean to grow rich?" (p. 13). Whether he is contemplating "the innocence" (p. 74) of muskoxen, the "intricate life of the polar bear" (p. 411), narwhals, migration, sea ice, or arctic light, Lopez has the ability to bring us to the edges of our senses. "This is an old business," he writes, "walking slowly over the land in anticipation of what lies hidden in it. The eye alights suddenly on something bright in the grass--the chitinous shell of an insect. The nose tugs at a minute blossom for some trace of arctic perfume. The hands turn over an odd bone, extrapolating, until the animal is discovered in the mind and seen to be moving in the land. One finds anomalous stones to puzzle over, and in footprints and broken spiderwebs the traces of irretrievable events" (p. 254). For Lopez, the Arctic region is "rich with metaphor, with adumbration. In a simple bow from the waist before the nest of the horned lark, you are able to stake your life, again, in what you dream" (p. xxix). He finds the "classic lines of a desert landscape" in the Arctic: "spare, balanced, extended, and quiet" (p. xxiii). This land is like poetry, Lopez observes: "it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life" (p. 274). The Arctic region is a microcosm of the large-scale advance of Western culture, oil, gas and mineral industries upon the planet, "a disquieting reminder" that we are "on a course as disastrously short-lived as was that of the whaling industry" (p. 11). Lopez writes, "to contemplate what people are doing out here and ignore the universe of the seal, to consider human quest and plight and not know the land, to not listen to it, seemed fatal. Not perhaps for tomorrow, or next year, but fatal if you looked down the long road of our determined evolution" (p. 13). As this book proves, Barry Lopez is nature writng at its best. G. Merritt
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