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team_worm 's review for:
adventurous
informative
reflective
slow-paced
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m always getting Barry Lopez confused with Wendell Berry. (Barry Lopez is the one with the rugged mountain man aesthetic; Wendell berry is the agrarian poet.)
The prose in Arctic Dreams is quite nice. It’s halfway between John McPhee (meh) and Ellen Meloy (love).
The prose in Arctic Dreams is quite nice. It’s halfway between John McPhee (meh) and Ellen Meloy (love).
Lopez is not coy about his thesis; he lays out exactly what he’s going to talk about in the prologue. This book is pretty much just him hanging out in the arctic (we never really find out what he’s doing there) and thinking a lot about the different ways different cultures have imagined and interacted with the land. It’s not quite a book about bioregionalism, though, since Lopez is an interloper.
Like any natural history, Arctic Dreams sometimes reads like a parade of facts but an attentive reader will still glean some pretty neat ecology and science tidbits. Chapters 8 and 9 were a bit of a slog for me. I know Lopez was trying to make a point about striving for knowledge and the hubris of western explorers but I still think he made the history of arctic exploration criminally boring.
On the whole, I appreciated the poetic and enjoyable prose but like much nature writing written by men, this sometimes felt overstuffed with scenes in which he’s doing some sort of masculine rugged adventure thing or brooding philosophically. More bowing to birds, less exposition please.
Like any natural history, Arctic Dreams sometimes reads like a parade of facts but an attentive reader will still glean some pretty neat ecology and science tidbits. Chapters 8 and 9 were a bit of a slog for me. I know Lopez was trying to make a point about striving for knowledge and the hubris of western explorers but I still think he made the history of arctic exploration criminally boring.
On the whole, I appreciated the poetic and enjoyable prose but like much nature writing written by men, this sometimes felt overstuffed with scenes in which he’s doing some sort of masculine rugged adventure thing or brooding philosophically. More bowing to birds, less exposition please.
My qualms are not Lopez’s fault. This book is great at being what it is, it’s just that I’ve found that lately I prefer it when nature writers dial up the curiosity, delight and wonder and dial down the seriousness.