Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape

by Barry Lopez

Book Overview

Winner of the National Book Award This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing. The Arctic is a perilous place. Only... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553346644
• ISBN13: 9780553346640
• Release Date: December 1988
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A Celebration Of The Arctic Landscape & Man's Dreams!

"Arctic Dreams" was recommended to me by a friend before I went on an Alaskan adventure a few years ago. This book expanded my vision of nature, and turned me on to the exquisite writing of Barry Lopez, who won the 1986 National Book Award for this classic work on the wild regions of the far north. "Arctic Dreams" is an extraordinary celebration of Arctic life and landscape which takes the reader on a journey to places rarely visited by man. Lopez' narrative does have a dreamlike quality, not only in its descriptions of nature at its most surreal, but in the absolute beauty of the writing itself. He does indeed capture the foreign reality of Arctic life, and death, with the loving care of an artist who places each brushstroke carefully on a canvas, bent on bringing the vision before him to others. Mr. Lopez made a number of extended trips to Siberia, Greenland, and northern Canada, including Baffin Island, to observe the flora and fauna of the region - polar bears, killer whales, caribou, narwhals - as well as the spectacular Arctic landscape. He experienced eerie encounters with the aurora borealis, massive migrating icebergs, solar and lunar light, halos and coronas. And he experienced both the potential for catastrophic danger and the remarkable beauty that the Arctic land and sea offers. "Spring storms can sweep hundreds of thousands of helpless infant harp seals into the sea" - juxtaposed with, "A tiny flower blooms in a field of snow touched by the sun's benevolent light." Through Mr. Lopez' eyes the breathtaking experience of the Arctic landscape and the people who inhabit it become palpably real. I was particularly moved by his intimate and compassionate descriptions of the indigenous people of this region, who so aptly illustrate how mankind is capable of living in harmony with his surroundings. Lopez' prose and his conclusions make the strongest argument possible to work for the ecological health of our planet, for the sake of life itself, and for the health of our imagination and sense of wonder at the magnificent.As mankind grows closer to conquering the earth's last frontiers, the issue of exploitation and encroachment becomes greater. For anyone who advocates preserving the few remaining wild areas on our planet, "Arctic Dreams" is a welcome gift and a source of motivation. It also provides an extraordinary read, and, perhaps, an awakening to those who have shown little interest in earth's most mysterious places.This is a magical book that will enchant and awe the reader. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Bravo, Barry Lopez!JANA

I wish someone could write about Australia like this!

Of all the books I've read on the artcic and antarctic, this stands out for its absolute precision of description. To see a landscape with Lopez' eyes, you would have to spend a lot of time looking, and absorbing what you saw, until you knew every inch of it with your eyes shut. So it's appropriate that when he describes things, the descriptions take time to write, they are precise, and thorough, and need to be read slowly. Any less would not convey the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the place. Lopez reminded me that many times, a day's aimless wandering about, just thinking about what you see, has as great a value as a day seeing the sights. My edition has no photos, which is appropriate as the verbal description is superb. If you read this book, keep the internet handy, to use search engines to find photos of the places he and things he writes about. It's like having a limitless dictionary to hand, and with subject matter as unfamiliar as this, it helps tremendously. One could say that the book was 25 years ahead of its time.

Arctic dreaming in the Arizona desert.

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

The finest 'nature book' written

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.