Being a rainy day, and having finished my schoolwork for the year, I had plenty of time to sit down and read.
Summary: The Future of Ice was not a climate change education book, like I thought. Rather, it was a record of Ehrlich's travels, from Tierra del Fuego to the frozen Rockies to a Nordic island near the North Pole.
What I liked: Ehrlich is also a poet, and that really comes through in her words. She has a beautiful vocabulary and each sentence flows, like poetry. Her descriptiveness painted a beautiful picture of these places, making them come alive even for those of us not fortunate enough to be able to go there.
What I did not like: Ehrlich's poetic background is quite apparent, including in the bad ways. She uses her metaphorical speaking even when talking about scientific facts, which somewhat bothered me and made it a little difficult to read. She droned a bit as well, and I often found myself checking the page numbers to determine how much more I had to read before I could be done.
Overall: I would give it a 6 out of 10.
Alternative reivew:
Publishers Weekly
In this lyrical meditation on deep cold and its potential demise through global warming, Ehrlich (The Solace of Open Spaces; This Cold Heaven) backpacks among the glaciers of the southern Andes, winters in a Wyoming cabin and sails with the research ship Noorderlicht to the Greenland ice pack. Her prose is as sharply observed as poetry and nearly as compressed, and her narrative favors short scenes as fragmented as the breaking ice sheets she encounters. Though it occasionally dips into underpowered assertion ("We're spoiled because we've been living in an interglacial paradise for twenty thousand years"), it often soars to the sublime ("We are made of weather and our thoughts stream from the braid work of stillness and storms"). Ehrlich includes plenty of facts (the area covered by glaciers has diminished by 75% since 1850; increased meltwater from Greenland may actually make Europe colder), but her book is less about science than about sensation: loneliness and the relentless circling of the snowed-in mind; the rumbling of a glacier as its azure ice crumbles away; the whistling, ululating calls of the bearded seal. It does not lay out the workings of global warming nor attempt to provide blueprints for how to rescue what we are losing. It stands, instead, as a passionate elegy to what is melting away.
Book details:
Paperback: 224 pages
Hardcover: 201 pages
Publisher: Vintage (November 8, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400034353
ISBN-13: 978-1400034352
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