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Summary: Popularized Ethnographic Study of Eskimo Culture
Review: This ethnographic study and travel guide about Greenland reminds me of Paul Theroux' "Happy Isles Of Oceania" which I read about 10 years ago. Ehrlich's frequent plane trips between Copenhagen and Greenland and her stopovers in the state-of-the-art American military base at Thule give the book a world-class feel, but beyond the airport checkpoints we are dealing with a culture many thousands of years old. She interviews numerous Danes with Eskimo blood or vice versa, or other outsiders who have decided to give up on modern society in favor of some more ancient or traditional values. Hence they become New Age subsistence hunters in Greenland. The book shows Ehrlich at the peak of her writing powers and also includes several interesting chapters on the explorations of the Arctic by the Dane Rasmussen in the 1920's as well as by other less renowned explorers. Many of these attempts failed, as one might reasonably expect in a land where the temperatures is frequently 30 or 40 below zero F. and is in complete darkness from November thru February and where starvation is or has been historically often a major issue, if she is to be believed.
Ehrlich's descriptive powers are really extraordinary in so many ways it would take too long to list them but by the end she has really given the reader a feel for Greenlandic indigineous culture as well as for the climate geography and topography of Greenland, much or most of which is ice and snow. Some of her scientific or pseudo-scientific reflections, apart from the ethnography, include: comments on modern astronomy, circadian rhythms and the effects of darkness on the modern vs. the Eskimo mind; snow blindness;ancient theories of vision as they pertain to loss of perspective in the vast Arctic expanses,and particularly the numerous colors and properties and qualities of ice,glaciers and icebergs. Eskimo society is a modern sociological nightmare, according to the author. In 1721 Danish Christian missionaries tried to put an end to Inuit shamanism but Ehrlich devotes many pages to the details of shamanistic beliefs,myths and rituals. There currently seems to be a strong movement afoot towards preserving traditional values in this slow-paced society where day and night are pretty much the same and where planning a trip can take many hours. Throughout much of the book Ehrlich and her companions or the other explorers are travelling by dogsled so there is considerable emphasis on the value of dogs in Greenlandic culture where they seem to outnumber the people. The ice can affect travel in surprising ways: because they travel by sled it is often impossible to travel before certain bodies of water freeze over so Eskimoes become experts in detecting thin ice. Certain of their habits struck me as repulsive: notably, their favorite delicacy which is rotted auks stuffed in a seal bladder, or their particular affinity for fresh seal liver. On the other hand, there certainly doesn't seem to be much waste in Greenlandic society as they appear to use all or most parts of their quarry for various purposes besides food such as clothing or shelter or making sleds or oil for their lamps.
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Summary: Lyrical
Review: "This Cold Heaven" is a mesmerizing patchwork of personal traveling account of a writer dedicated to the frozen land of Greenland, anthropological survey augmented by the historical flashbacks to the times of the land's discovery. Snip: (...)
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Summary: A paean to the Inuit and to Greenland
Review: "This Cold Heaven" is more than anything an ode, a paean to Greenland by one woman. I think in some ways she loves that icebound land as much as Lawrence of Arabia was reported to love the desert, and perhaps for somewhat similar reasons. Her book was full of poetic descriptions of towering icebergs, driving snowstorms, crisp nearly eternal nights, and sheets of mirror-like ice. Admiring the vast ice sheet covering the island, which she described as "a siren singing me back to Greenland, its walls of sapphire blue and sheer immensity always beguiling," she really put me there on that island. An American writer, she was drawn to Greenland again and again over the better part of a decade and in this book she chronicles her experiences there as well as much information on Greenland, chiefly about the Inuit people of that land, though to a lesser extent about some of its fauna, flora, geology, and climate. She recounts her travels - mainly by dogsled, but also by boat and helicopter - throughout this largest island in the world, a land under which 95% of it is still locked in ice, a land in which some say the Ice Age never ended at all.The stars of the book are the Inuit, both as a people and as individuals. Clearly a people she greatly admires both as a culture and as individuals, the reader will learn much about them, descendents of Asians who crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia perhaps 30,000 years, settling Greenland some 5,000 years ago. Their culture - stretching some 6,000 miles from Greenland through Alaska - is a surprisingly unified one, largely speaking the same language and telling the same stories. Indeed not only have they been very unified across distances on land but also across distances in time; many Inuit in Greenland are still essentially using stone and bone age technology (though one increasingly threatened by the arrival of modern technology and the Danish welfare state), even creating string figure art of woolly mammoths, a unique societal memory of a species extinct for many thousands of years. The Inuit we find are often a people of vivid contrasts and to us perhaps strange habits. Though they enjoy the summer time, which in their part of the world is short though one of unending daylight, they most enjoy the completely dark winters, something perhaps counterintuitive to those not native there; it is only in the dark time of the year that fjords and bays are ice, allowing long sled trips for hunting and for visiting friends. Clocks and calendars are nearly meaningless to the Inuit; Ehrlich often found it to be the case either in the unending night of winter (we also learn by the way that the Inuit word for "winter" also means "a year") or in the unending day of summer people would be awake at any hour, whether to fix dinner, socialize, or begin a hunt. One on occasion when a visitor remarked that a dogsled expedition should be gotten off to an early start, Ehrlich recounted how one of the Inuit laughed, stating that their day had more hours. Inuit food may appear equally strange to the typical American or European; they eat a virtually all- meat diet, the climate and terrain of Greenland completely unsuited to agriculture. Seal, walrus, polar bear, whale, dovekie, auk, and fish are the mainstays of Inuit diet, many times boiled or dried, sometimes eaten raw. One of the more interesting foods they eat is kivioq, a delicacy made from dead auks sewn into a seal gut and left to rot for two months. Though upsetting many Western environmentalists, Ehrlich does an excellent job of showing how the Inuit hunt for survival, not for profit or ritual. Many times she went on dogsled expeditions during which if a hunt for seal was unsuccessful dogs and later people would starve. Clearly the Inuit of Greenland hunt for food and for furs to make warm clothing, doing so with the greatest respect for the animals. Any money they made from their hunts went to buy necessities, such as fuel oil or pencils for children in school. Ehrlich makes much of the strange dichotomy of seeming cruelty and community. On the one hand during times of hardship, after their much beloved (and utterly important) dogs were eaten (as well as their sleds; we find that in the past that sleds were sometimes constructed of edible materials, with skins soaked in water and frozen into place for runners and even solid frozen chunks of salmon or seal flesh for other parts) the Inuit would turn to cannibalism, even eating their own children. The very old were often expected to die if they became a burden to their community, and orphans, particularly if outsiders, could often be quite harshly treated. Inuit parents she noted often laughed at their children's misfortunes as they learned to handle a sled or hunt, all in an effort to teach them survival skills, however cruel that might appear to an outsider. On the other hand though, the Inuit could be thought of the ideal Communists to some degree; no one owned land. When meat was available, it was freely shared to all who needed. Dogs were always fed first (though this was not entirely altruistic, as aside from kayaks in water this was their chief means of locomotion) and even widows in villages would share in the bounty of a great hunt. Ehrlich spends a good deal of the book recounting the adventures and travels of the ethnographer Knud Rasmussen (a Danish researcher who launched seven expeditions between 1910 and 1933 to study the Inuit people all over Greenland and west to Siberia) and his friend Peter Freuchen, clear outsiders who were warmly welcomed into village after village, whose lived were saved by Inuit, people who brought them into their homes, shared their food, their stories, their way of life. A wonderful book.
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Summary: This Heavenly Chronicle
Review: Greenland isn't green at all, but the world's largest island is covered by the biggest continental ice shelf in the world. Sparsely populated on the rocky outer fringes of its 840,000 square miles, it's probably as unknown to Americans as anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Gretel Ehrlich knows its ice leads and midnight sun as well as any American, and probably as well as any non-Inuit except for a handful of Danes, whose territory it is. That's because she's obsessed with the North in general and with Greenland in particular. Over the past decade, she has traveled to the frozen island at least seven times, staying for months at a stretch, traveling long distances by dogsled, making friends with hunters and villagers, and participating in seal and
polar bear hunts. Erlich chronicles her trips and relationships in a new book called "This Cold Heaven." ((...) 377 pages, Pantheon Books) She does far more than record her own journeys, however. She also puts Greenland into cultural, historical, and anthropological perspective by weaving her trips with those of Knud Rasmussen, who died in 1933 after traversing the polar North from Greenland to Alaska. Even now, some of Greenlandic culture is largely unchanged from the days when Rasmussen and his close friend Peter Freuchen made "first" contact with some of the bands of isolated Inuit (Eskimos) on the island. Bears, seals, hare, fox and walrus are still hunted for food, clothing and fuel made from blubber, dogsled is still the chief method of land transport, and ancient stories and religion abound. There are modern encroachments, however - Danish bureaucracy, snowmobiles, alcohol, helicopters, and cars, to say nothing of the enormous American military base at Thule. Erlich is enticed by the old ways, which seem as pristine and "unbroken" as Greenland's vast ice. She is also enticed by the ice itself, communal life, the land, and the dramatic ways with which Inuit culture deals with a nature it cannot dominate. Her own use of language sometimes approaches the poetic, which isn't so surprising when you learn that she's a poet, too. Using the specialized language of poetry, Erlich is able to render what might seem a static and frozen environment into one that lives and breathes on the page. She's at her best when she describes the physical world, whether populated by other humans at the time or only by 25 varieties of ice, snow, and the midnight sun. She does a good job, too, of delving into the lives of both exiled Danes and Greenlanders, and when she doesn't know something, she's not afraid to say so. More often than not, she finds out and lets the reader know. Sometimes, I found certain facts repeated and wasn't sure why. Not a huge deal, but distracting. Also, I would have liked to know a little more about the personal relationships Erlich cultivated on the island, although that wasn't the purpose of the book, and is almost a compliment, rather than a criticism, because I found her such an interesting person. Her aim was to view history, cultural observation and travel through her own prism, and to create a picture of Greenland that is simultaneously unique and universal and conveys the essence of the unlikely place she has come to love. If those are, in fact, her goals, Erlich succeeds.
Rating: 
Summary: This Cold Heaven
Review: Gretel Ehrlich's wonderful book has been a nightly treat, savored at the fireside. Since the lives of the Greenland Inuit are so remote from daily experience, it takes quite a bit of adjustment to enter into their perspective. Ehrlich accomplishes this through an obsessive, recurring immersion, reminiscent of her hero Knud Rassmussen. She went back to Greenland seven times, for goodness sakes! The focus she achieves through these revisitings, and our chance to re-encounter characters and experiences, builds a powerful emotional bond. I felt a real loss when I had to say goodbye to these characters for the final time. This is a deceptively beautiful, powerful book.
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Summary: Deceptively beautiful and powerful
Review: Gretel Ehrlich's wonderful book has been a nightly treat, savored at the fireside. Since the lives of the Greenland Inuit are so remote from daily experience, it takes quite a bit of adjustment to enter into their perspective. Ehrlich accomplishes this through an obsessive, recurring immersion, reminiscent of her hero Knud Rassmussen. She went back to Greenland seven times, for goodness sakes! The focus she achieves through these revisitings, and our chance to re-encounter characters and experiences, builds a powerful emotional bond. I felt a real loss when I had to say goodbye to these characters for the final time. This is a deceptively beautiful, powerful book.
Rating: 
Summary: disappointing
Review: Having heard Ehrlich speak on NPR's Saavy Traveler about her time in Greenland, I had high hopes for THIS COLD HEAVEN. She spoke about the endless nights and endless days of the Artic, the cold and the snow and the ice. It promised to be a meditation on both the inner life of a writer living in relatively isolation and on her discovery of the riches that lay within that dark and cold world. Imagine my disappointment after handing over $... to find a book that was neither poetic nor particularly well done. Ehrlich's metaphors gush without precision. Her historical writing skills are dismall. I could barely get through her retelling of what by all accounts is a riviting history of human exploration of the Artic. The best parts of this book, which desperately needs an editor, were here own narratives. But they could not carry the three hundred plus pages saddled on them. Very disappointing.
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Summary: An Interesting Read
Review: Having never heard of Gretel Ehrlich I came to this book without any idea of the author's past experiences. The book is incredibly intense. The first half of the book is more difficult to read that the second half. The author alludes to personal trauma and a need to confront her own fears but does so in a disjointed style. Her musing about the effects of total darkness and the climate made me wonder exactly what she was trying to say. Better editing in this section might help. What made me persist was my need to find out more about Greenland and its Inuit people as well as to try and understand what made Ehrlich keep going back. At times I wondered if she was hoping to die out on the ice. There is a deep sadness that seems to run through her during this time that is reflected in the effect of modernisation and outsider intervention into the lives of the indigenous people. Throughout the book she is always living on the edge of the society unable to find a way in. The lonely curious outsider. Her usage of Rasmussen as a guide to many different facets of the history and exploration of Greenland, and the American Artic improves over time. His travels and travails seem to have been a large part of her inspiration during the trips to Greenland.
An unusual book that is worth the effort it takes to read it.
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Summary: Greenland: Past and Present
Review: Having spent two weeks on a ship last August travelling from Kangerlussuaq to Siorapaluk and back, it was great to see the magnificance of Greenland through another's eyes. Ehrlich describes her seven seasons in Greenland, but the book is also interspersed with accounts of the adventures of the "greats" who explored the Arctic--Rasmussen, Freuchen, and Kent. The author has a keen sense of the beauty of the Arctic and its people.
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Summary: Brilliant book
Review: I absolutely loved this book. It was amazingly dreamlike and informative at the same time. The inspiration to visit Greenland is so much stronger after reading this book. My own library of Greenland books is huge, but largely historical and/or archaeological. This book brings me "real" Greenland. Reading it every night until completed literally inspired many evenings of Greenlandic dreams.
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