Recent Reading: Arctic Dreams
Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is certainly a unique book. It is a difficult book to summarize. Here is some of what Michiko Kakutani wrote about the book in the NYTimes in 1986: …Having spent some five years traveling through the Arctic, Mr. Lopez possesses a deep, almost mystical reverence for nature and the land; and while this results in a handful of passages tinged with a sort of Whole Earth Catalogue sentimentality (is it possible, he wonders at one point, for man ''to live at moral peace with the universe?'') most of ''Arctic Dreams'' is set down in lucid, gracious prose. Drawing upon the work of geologists, explorers, anthropologists, archeologists and biologists, in addition to assorted myths and bits of Eskimo lore, Mr. Lopez begins by conjuring up, for his readers, an impressionistic, collage-like picture of the North. Rather than distracting the reader, the narrative digressions gradually take on a kind of organic order, as the author loops back...
